Twice-Divided Nation: National Memory, Transatlantic News, and American Literature in the Civil War Era by Samuel Graber (review)

Samuel Graber's ambitious book explores the relationship between nationalism, memory, and transatlantic news reporting in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Focusing in particular on Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as well as the literary writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Graber traces what he reads as a growing struggle between a largely US-based "presentist" mode of memory and its British "traditionalist" counterpart. This "memory war" was largely fought in the pages of newspapers, publications that not only covered but indeed helped accelerate the struggle through innovations in the production and circulation of the news. Perhaps the most impressive element of Graber's excellent book is the interdisciplinary method that he brings to his study. Bringing together insights and approaches from literary, religious, and memory studies, Graber's book provides a model of how to map out the relationships between periodicals and the worlds they inhabit.

Graber divides his book into two sections. Part one traces the emergence of a presentist mode of memory in the United States in the 1840s and early 1850s. Chapter one focuses on the ways in which Horace Greeley created with his Tribune a newspaper that imagined a national community bound together by a "shared access to the recent past" (33). As a contrast, Graber reads the Gothic architecture of the renovated Palace of Westminster in London as emblematic of a British traditionalist attempt to "recover unity in antiquity" (33). In a vivid embodiment of this comparison, Greeley would arrive at Westminster in the summer of 1851 to testify before Parliament on the status of the American news industry. Chapter two moves from Greeley and the Tribune to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the anti-slavery press. Reading Emerson's commentary on and rejection of British traditionalism alongside William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery Liberator, Graber places an Emersonian commitment to presentism at the center of the abolitionist news strategy. By adopting the presentist mode theorized by Emerson and later perfected by Greeley, Garrison and other abolitionist editors made "a vast readership recognize slavery primarily as a current event" (67). This strategy, argues Graber, represented a powerful assault on the traditionalist attempt to consolidate national identity through memorializations of past glory, as American "freedom could not easily be commemorated when it had yet to be achieved" (67). Chapter three turns to the early newspaper poetry of Walt Whitman, and especially a cycle of three poems published in the Tribune in the wake of the Compromise of 1850. Situating Whitman's poetry within the pages of the Tribune's anti-slavery articles, Graber convincingly reads the poems as presentist responses to Daniel Webster's traditionalist defense of the Compromise. According to Graber, the Tribune did more than just provide a venue for Whitman's early poetry: the newspaper's presentist practices fundamentally influenced Whitman's development as a poet.

Part two moves from a tight focus on US-based newspapers to a broader exploration of transatlantic news coverage. Graber looks in particular at how the news manifested the distance in time and space between Britain and the United States and thus helped reify distinct national identities. "By materially manifesting the transatlantic time lag," he writes, "national newspapers projected a clear geographical limit on news sharing and gave presentist memory a tangible place to settle" (102). Chapter four examines how newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic covered the Great Exhibition of All Nations, held in London's Crystal Palace. Though this first world's fair was designed to foster international connections, Graber reveals how, in "their effort to concoct nationalist histories for their home audiences from the raw material of internationalist news," national newspapers "helped convert an exhibition to facilitate peace among nations into a battlefield in the memory war" (109). Chapter five pivots to news coverage of two overlapping conflicts that...