John R. Neff – författare
Visar alla böcker från författaren John R. Neff. Handla med fri frakt och snabb leverans.
2 produkter
2 produkter
Häftad, Engelska, 2005
410 kr
Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar
By the end of the Civil War, fatalities from that conflict had far exceeded previous American experience, devastating families and communities alike. As John Neff shows, commemorating the 620,000 lives lost proved to be a persistent obstacle to the hard work of reuniting the nation, as every memorial observation compelled painful recollections of the war.Neff contends that the significance of the Civil War dead has been largely overlooked and that the literature on the war has so far failed to note how commemorations of the dead provide a means for both expressing lingering animosities and discouraging reconciliation. Commemoration from private mourning to the often extravagant public remembrances exemplified in cemeteries, monuments, and Memorial Day observances provided Americans the quintessential forum for engaging the war's meaning.Additionally, Neff suggests a special significance for the ways in which the commemoration of the dead shaped Northern memory. In his estimation, Northerners were just as active in myth-making after the war. Crafting a ""Cause Victorious"" myth that was every bit as resonant and powerful as the much better-known ""Lost Cause"" myth cherished by Southerners, the North asserted through commemorations the existence of a loyal and reunified nation long before it was actually a fact. Neff reveals that as Northerners and Southerners honored their separate dead, they did so in ways that underscore the limits of reconciliation between Union and Confederate veterans, whose mutual animosities lingered for many decades after the end of the war.Ultimately, Neff argues that the process of reunion and reconciliation that has been so much the focus of recent literature either neglects or dismisses the persistent reluctance of both Northerners and Southerners to ""forgive and forget"", especially where their war dead were concerned. Despite reunification, the continuing imperative of commemoration reflects a more complex resolution to the war than is even now apparent. His book provides a compelling account of this conflict that marks a major contribution to our understanding of the war and its many meanings.
- Nyhet
Häftad, Engelska, 2026
314 kr
Skickas
As America's bloodiest conflict, it is no surprise that the Civil War gave rise to a golden age of ghost stories. Popular publications were filled with accounts of ghosts—ghosts that appeared in the heat of battle, in the fretful quiet of picket duty, and in the miserable confines of hospitals and prisons. Civil War ghosts continued to haunt the troubled peace that followed, revealing that even so deadly a conflict left unresolved issues in its wake. In a nation forever altered by the war, these ghost stories speak to something far more meaningful than Americans' taste for spine-tingling entertainment. They provide powerful evidence of how they tried to put the trauma, grief, and anxieties inflicted by the Civil War to rest. By telling ghost stories, Americans created narratives that honored the dead, explained the unexplainable, and gave their experiences a broader sense of identity and purpose.In this annotated anthology of Civil War ghost stories, historians John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker offer the first scholarly analysis of the significance of ghosts to the history and memory of the Civil War. Haunted by Memory includes hundreds of examples of ghostly tales that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books between 1861 and 1932. These tales both satisfied and fed popular demand for news, entertainment, and ghostlore, and became powerful tools of cultural memory. By bridging the study of the Civil War, folklore, and memory, this collection expands the parameters of cultural history and reveals how the supernatural became a lasting part of the commemorative landscape of the American Civil War.