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. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 30
... Mortality” 6 Chapter Two. “The Heavenly Country” 38 Chapter Three. “Melancholy Pleasure” 70 Chapter Four. “A Voice from the Ruins” 97 Chapter Five. “Better to Die Free, Than to Live Slaves” 126 Chapter Six. “The Court of Death” 163 ...
... Mortality... Imitated from a Painting in the Cemetery of the Dominican Church at Basil, Switzerland 7 2. Joseph Ward, Death of Lieut. Col. Henry Clay, Jr., of the Second Kentucky Volunteers. At the Battle of Buena Vista, Feb. 23, 1847 ...
... in the middle of the nineteenth century and provides us with a fresh perspective on the cost of the Civil War, then it will have succeeded. chapter one F “Emblems of Mortality” The generation of Americans INTRODUCTION 5.
... mortality. Based on the “dance of death” tradition that stretched back to early modern Europe, the pamphlet Emblems of Mortality articulated a worldview that we moderns find nearly impossible to conjure. In a series of engravings and ...
... Mortality; Representing, By Engravings, Death Seizing All Ranks and Conditions of People. Imitated from a Painting in the Cemetery of the Dominican Church at Basil, Switzerland. With an Apostrophe to Each, Translated from the Latin. To ...
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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 - 2011 |
Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death Mark S. Schantz Vista previa limitada - 2013 |