Editor's Overview

Welcome to this special issue of Civil War History. On October 17, 2015, the Department of History at West Virginia University hosted a special one-day conference, called "Objects as Subjects: Material Cultures of the Civil War Era." The presentations and the roundtable focused on how material objects shaped the experience of war. For this special issue of Civil War History, we have invited Brian Luskey and Jason Phillips, who organized the conference, to share some of the presentations and discussion that took place on that beautiful fall afternoon in Morgantown and beyond.

Preston Brooks's May 1856 assault on Charles Sumner transformed a common cane into a bitterly contested symbol. For some, it was Exhibit A in the case against the brutally domineering slave power; for others, it was a relic of southern chivalry. As Michael E. Woods notes, crucially, the cane's materiality—its dimensions, composition, and durability—shaped interpretations of the attack, both in its immediate aftermath and for generations to come. He examines both how contemporaries in 1856 weighed the seriousness of Brooks's deed in the heft of his weapon and the cane's fascinating, fragmented post-1856 history.

In May 1865, American, Bermudian, and Canadian newspapers were covering a Yellow Fever Plot in which a Confederate physician was accused of attempting to infect the northern masses with soiled clothing used during a Bermudian yellow fever epidemic. Sarah Jones Weicksel addresses why such a plot was conceivable, exploring the connections among Civil War–era beliefs about clothing, disease, and the nation. Drawing together textual, material, and visual sources, she takes seriously clothing as a physical object that was worn, soiled, laundered, and destroyed. The article argues that period understandings of disease transmission, cloth's physical ability to carry and transmit disease, and broader fears about the nation's stability together created a context in which it was possible to imagine infected clothing as a threat not just to individuals but to the nation itself.

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C. Ian Stevenson examines how five of Maine's Civil War regimental associations erected communal summer cottages on Casco Bay's harbor islands. These buildings—individually designed but featuring similar spaces—married memory and leisure by incorporating Union veteran reunions with vacation activities that deliberately embraced the participation of wives and children. Much more than comfortable vacation spaces lined with Civil War memorabilia, these cottages attempted to satisfy multivalent veteran needs as places for solidifying memory, promoting healing, and conveying a legacy controlled by the veterans themselves. The veteran cottages offer a new framework for Civil War–era material culture analysis rooted in landscape and architecture. The cottages acted upon objects and people, constructing the architecture for Union soldiers' memories; under one roof, they sheltered fraternity, family, and furlough, simultaneously conveying triumph and loss.

The special issue concludes with a roundtable discussion on the importance of material culture in shaping the future of Civil War studies. Our reviews section touches on the important issue of race in nineteenth-century America. Reviewed texts illustrate the new and fascinating directions in the field and tackle subjects such as the Federal Writers Project, the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, the important role of education during the Reconstruction period, slave-on-slave violence, border kidnappings, and Lincoln's views on the Constitution.