John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War
by Franny Nudelman
23 Members (2.00)
On This Page
Description
Singing "John Brown's Body" as they marched to war, Union soldiers sought to steel themselves in the face of impending death. As the bodies of these soldiers accumulated in the wake of battle, writers, artists, and politicians extolled their deaths as a means to national unity and rebirth. Many scholars have followed suit, and the Civil War is often remembered as an inaugural moment in the development of national identity. Revisiting the culture of the Civil War, Franny Nudelman analyzes the show more idealization of mass death and explores alternative ways of depicting the violence of war. Considering martyred soldiers in relation to suffering slaves, she argues that responses to wartime death cannot be fully understood without attention to the brutality directed against African Americans during the antebellum era. Throughout, Nudelman focuses not only on representations of the dead but also on practical methods for handling, studying, and commemorating corpses. She narrates heated conflicts over the political significance of the dead: whether in the anatomy classroom or the Army Medical Museum, at the military scaffold or the national cemetery, the corpse was prized as a source of authority. Integrating the study of death, oppression, and war, John Brown's Body makes an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship that meditates on the relationship between violence and culture. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
2+ Works 35 Members
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, and the Culture of War
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, Sociology, General Nonfiction, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 973.7 — History & geography History of North America United States Civil War Era (1857-1865)
- LCC
- E468.9 .N84 — History of the United States United States Civil War period, 1861-1865 The Civil War, 1861-1865
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 23
- Popularity
- 1,145,315
- Rating
- (2.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
