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  • The Material Cultures of the Civil WarA Conversation
  • Joan E. Cashin (bio), Brian Craig Miller, Megan Kate Nelson (bio), and Jason Phillips (bio)

To conclude this special issue, four historians who have researched material cultures of the Civil War era consider, in the discussion that follows, how new scholarship on the subject can deepen our understanding of the period. We hope that this conversation among Joan E. Cashin, Brian Craig Miller, Megan Kate Nelson, and Jason Phillips encourages other historians to acknowledge and interpret the things they encounter in their own work.

Why did you decide to study Civil War material cultures?

Megan Kate Nelson (MKN):

I've always been interested in using different kinds of sources—and methodologies—to study history, even as far back as my undergraduate days. But it was really during my PhD program (Iowa, American Studies) that I began to think more about visual images and how to use them as historical evidence. Once I started thinking about paintings, illustrations, and photographs as objects in and of themselves—not just as visual content to analyze—I made that leap to the material. I didn't come to Civil War material culture studies until I started researching Ruin Nation[: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012)], however. All of the ruins I examine in the book are material forms, made of stone, living wood, flesh, and bone. I was interested in ruins in and of themselves, how they were created and endured in the landscape, and how soldiers and civilians encountered them. I was also interested, though, in finding out [End Page 181] how ruins were depicted in print and visual forms. For me, this was the most exciting thing, to study the ways material, print, and visual culture are interconnected (and sometimes, mutually constitutive) and how together they can tell us about the lived experience of warfare.

Joan E. Cashin (JC):

I got interested in material culture and the physical environment because of what I have found while doing research in the manuscripts. As I was working on my first book, A Family Venture[: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (1991)], I discovered that many southerners, white and black, male and female, had deep feelings about the landscapes where they lived—feelings of affection and/or alienation, depending on the person and the locale. Some of those ideas appeared in the book. Because the Virginia landscape in particular seemed to inspire a lot of commentary, I did a follow-up article in 1994.

While I was researching a documents book on white southern women, Our Common Affairs[: Texts from Women in the Old South (1996)], I realized that some women were highly observant about the material world, especially objects within the household. In the introductory essay, I called for more scholarship on this topic, but that landed with a thud. There was not much of a response from historians of southern women or the war era.

When I was working on the biography of Varina Davis [First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War], which came out in 2006, once again I noted that she cared deeply about certain household objects. She tried hard to recover the family's belongings that disappeared at the end of the war, with mixed results. All sorts of objects pertaining to her husband became historical relics in 1865, and after he died she had to sort out what to do with them. So material culture was a subtext in her life, although the focus of that biography was her overall life experience. When that book was done, I decided to explore the field of material studies more fully. The literature turned out to be very stimulating, with a lot of creative work in history and other fields, and I think it has a great deal to offer war scholars.

MKN:

Joan, I think it's really interesting that we both came to material cultural studies through other sources—landscapes for you, visual images for me. Now I want to know if this was the case for the rest of you! Also, [Joan,] why do you think your call to action in 1996 came to nothing...

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