[Another entry
in my biannual
series on interesting and impressive new
releases in AmericanStudies. Add your favorite works, new or old, in
comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]
On a classic
work that has endured, a new one that complements it, and what they offer us
together.
In those moments
when I wonder how on earth I’m going to keep writing six blog posts a week for,
well, as long as the interwebs will have me, I take comfort in reflecting on
just how many topics of significance to me I have yet to cover (to say nothing
of all those I continue to discover). A prominent example would be historian George
Frederickson’s The Inner
Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union (University
of Illinois, 1993). While not Frederickson’s most prominent work (that would
have to be White
Supremacy, his comparative study of America and South Africa that was
nominated for a Pulitzer), Inner Civil
War was a particularly seminal book in my own development; I read it during
my first year of college, as part of my first American
History and Literature Tutorial, and it gave me one of my first glimmers of
the breadth and depth possible in genuine AmericanStudies scholarly analysis. In
his combinations of intellectual history, literary analysis, use of historical
primary documents, and sweeping arguments about American culture and identity,
Frederickson helped push both our understanding of the Civil War and the
possibilities of our scholarly endeavors forward.
It’s much too early
to say whether Stephen
Cushman’s Belligerent Muse: Five Northern
Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University
of North Carolina, 2014) will similarly influence and endure in our scholarly conversations.
But in his book, Cushman (who is, full disclosure, a long-time colleague of my
Dad and family friend) considers his handful of historical and literary
subjects (Abraham
Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose
Bierce, and Joshua
Chamberlain) through a multi-layered, interdisciplinary lens that is just
as sweeping and as successful as was Frederickson’s. Just the act of bringing
together those five figures and considering them through the same two-part lens—the
way they tried to make sense of the war through writing, and the role that
their writing has played in shaping our own subsequent narratives of the war—is
a striking and significant one, and forces us to rethink our conceptions of not
only the figures themselves, but of our categorizations and distinctions between
such roles as politician and poet, military leader and creative writer, actor
and reflector. For that reason, among others, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cushman’s
book did indeed endure as Frederickson’s has.
As is so often
the case, I believe these strong individual works have even more to offer our collective
perspective if we put them in conversation with one another. For one thing,
their chronologies are nicely complementary—Frederickson begins before the war
and moves his subjects and readers into and through it, whereas Cushman begins
in the war and moves us into the post-bellum era. For another, Frederickson’s
focus on a group of intellectuals (including philosophers like Ralph Waldo
Emerson and abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison) likewise complements the
more political and literary figures and writers in Cushman’s frame; while both,
interestingly enough, analyze Walt Whitman through their respective lenses,
providing a bridge between these approaches. Finally, and to my mind most
compellingly, the two books offer an interdisciplinary combination that extends
and amplifies that element within each: Frederickson starts from the
perspective of an intellectual historian and then extends to military and political
history, literary analysis, and more; whereas Cushman is first and foremost a
literary scholar, and then weds that approach to historical analysis, military
and political history, and more. Taken together, the two have even more to tell
us about the Civil War and the 19th century, American ideas and
narratives, and the way we remember and engage with our histories and writers.
Next new book
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
AmericanStudies books would you recommend?
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