The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (review)

338CIVIL WAR HISTORY Further, throughout the book he extracts information from many ofthese claims in shaping the narrator's account ofhow these individuals responded to the war. Despite these strengths, a reader cannot help but ask whether any single Culpeper residentcould have had such an extensive knowledge ofcircumstances. The narrator frequently appears to be too all-knowing. For example, we are informed that Culpeper's Dr. Daniel S. Green lost fifty-nine of 775 patients in July 1861, and that thirty-nine ofthem died from battlefield wounds. While the hospital records clearly are the source for this account, the narrator adds that the first man to die in Dr. Green's hospital was Thomas Needham, a Massachusetts private shot at Blackburn's Ford on July 18. Further, it is revealed that Needham's death will be particularly difficult for his fifty-year-old widowed mother, Sarah , since as the oldest of several children Needham more than likely provided his family's financial support. Could any resident of Culpeper be able to link this disparate information? Clearly the efforts of a very creative historian are demonstrated here rather than an extremely perceptive narrator. Daniel E. Sutherland's Seasons of War, the recipient of both the Daniel and Marilyn Laney Award and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award, surely will more than satisfy those readers looking for an account of the entire span of the Civil War that captures the drama of the conflict as it unfolded for a wide spectrum of participants. Robert C. Kenzer University of Richmond The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past. By Jim Cullen. (Herndon, Va.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Pp. x, 253. $29.95.) Why does the Civil War loom so dominantly in the American collective consciousness ?A thoughtful colleague suggests that we are unconsciously redefining what it means to be an American, replacing our Daughters of the American Revolution credentials with more recent and more commonly shared ones (i.e., the Civil War). My explanation is simpler: the war coincided with the maturation of photography in our mass culture. We can see ourselves in the eyes of those who peer out of those many black and white images, the emergence of the modern American. Ken Burns tapped a wellspring of public interest with his 1993 video Civil War saga. Burns's work attempted to use the war to explain the contemporary cultural situation, and a marvelously creative debate was triggered . Jim Cullen's masterful work is perfectly timed to define further and guide that fragmented yet earnest national debate. He frames the several key questions (or connections) and offers thoughtful answers and a broader explanation of the way we "do history" and how that "doing" says more about who we are now than it might say about the "true" past. Author Cullen's central purpose is to trace how popular culture and history have represented the fundamental meanings of the American Civil War over BOOK REVIEWS339 time, each medium mirroring and influencing the other as successive contemporary crises required the evocation and reinterpretation of the past in order to mobilize a crisis response. Even the academic historians, supposedly sheltered from "ideological commitments," were far from immune from the influence of popular culture. Cullen pleads for what he terms a "reusable past," one defined as an "indigenous national tradition that would bridge and improve both [the academic history and the mass or popular culture]." He closes with the hope that "we can continue to engage with our past and use it to touch and strengthen the better angels of our nature." As with any effort at cultural synthesis, Cullen traces and critiques the major contributors in each of the several fields of popular culture. Best of all for the Civil War enthusiast is a simply marvelous recounting ofthe several successive Lincoln-focused and the more generalist Civil War scholars. Cullen then uses these overviews to show how various historical schools and their then contemporary popular culture eras reinterpreted what many consider to be hard and fast historical fact. This reviewer was dumbfounded to learn (and embarrassed to learn belatedly) that Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg was, in the words of writer Edmund Wilson, "the worst thing...