Overview

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

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9780820355931

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Kathleen Diffley is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa and Director of the Civil War Caucus at the M/MLA. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitution Reform, 1861-1876 (Georgia, 1992); the editor of To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876; and Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894. Her work has appeared in American Literary History, Comparative American Studies, American Quarterly, American Periodicals, Prospects, and seven collections of scholarly essays. Benjamin Fagan is an associate professor of English at Auburn University. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Georgia), which was named an Honorable Mention for the Research Society of American Periodicals Book Prize. He is also the editor of the forthcoming African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850. His work has appeared in journals such as African American Review, Legacy, and American Periodicals. Barbara McCaskill is a professor of English at the University of Georgia, and co-director of the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative. She is the author of Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 (New York University Press, 2006), Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (Georgia, 2015), and a teaching edition of the 1860 memoir Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (University of Georgia Press, 1999). Timothy Sweet is the Eberly Family Professor of American Literature at West Virginia University. He is the author of American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature and Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union.

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