Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of DeathCornell University Press, 2011 M03 15 - 264 páginas "Americans came to fight the Civil War in the midst of a wider cultural world that sent them messages about death that made it easier to kill and to be killed. They understood that death awaited all who were born and prized the ability to face death with a spirit of calm resignation. They believed that a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the grave. They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished forever by posterity. They grasped that death itself might be seen as artistically fascinating and even beautiful."—from Awaiting the Heavenly Country How much loss can a nation bear? An America in which 620,000 men die at each other's hands in a war at home is almost inconceivable to us now, yet in 1861 American mothers proudly watched their sons, husbands, and fathers go off to war, knowing they would likely be killed. Today, the death of a soldier in Iraq can become headline news; during the Civil War, sometimes families did not learn of their loved ones' deaths until long after the fact. Did antebellum Americans hold their lives so lightly, or was death so familiar to them that it did not bear avoiding? In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, Mark S. Schantz argues that American attitudes and ideas about death helped facilitate the war's tremendous carnage. Asserting that nineteenth-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began rather than arising from a sense of resignation after the losses became apparent, Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate. Schantz addresses topics such as the pervasiveness of death in the culture of antebellum America; theological discourse and debate on the nature of heaven and the afterlife; the rural cemetery movement and the inheritance of the Greek revival; death as a major topic in American poetry; African American notions of death, slavery, and citizenship; and a treatment of the art of death—including memorial lithographs, postmortem photography and Rembrandt Peale's major exhibition painting The Court of Death. Awaiting the Heavenly Country is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the Civil War and the ways in which antebellum Americans comprehended death and the unimaginable bloodshed on the horizon. |
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... , advertisement for John Ashton, Importer and Manufacturer of Musical Instruments, ca. 1830 44 7. Alexandre & Cesar la recovient dans les cieux, ca. 1821 45 IX X ILLUSTRATIONS 8. Washington Welcoming Lincoln into Heaven, 1865 68.
... Heaven, 1865 68 9. The Desperation of a Mother, from The Anti-Slavery Record, September 1835 134 10. The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, who escaped from Richmond, Virginia in a box 3 feet long 21⁄2 ft. deep and 2 ft ...
... heaven or because they grasped that their deaths might be politically valuable or aesthetically pleasing.10 Culture operates in more subtle, but no less powerful, ways. What I argue here is that how people behaved on their deathbeds ...
... Heaven.”16 Mary Edmondson understood that death, however difficult it was to bear, was an integral part of life. From the first moments of life, antebellum Americans confronted the specter of high childhood mortality rates. The case of ...
... Heaven” for children that featured a dialogue between a mother and a young child about to die. “Is it not dreadful to die?” asks the young boy. “It is not dreadful to such as love God and do all they can to serve and please him ...
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Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death Mark S. Schantz Vista previa limitada - 2013 |