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 57
... “A Voice from the Ruins” 97 Chapter Five. “Better to Die Free, Than to Live Slaves” 126 Chapter Six. “The Court of Death” 163 Epilogue 207 Notes 211 Index 237 List of Illustrations 1. Emblems of Mortality... Imitated from a.
... Slavery, ca. 1810 42 5. Nathaniel Currier, certificate for the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, ca. 1835 43 6. Thomas Sparrow, advertisement for John Ashton, Importer and Manufacturer of Musical Instruments, ca ...
... Slavery Record, September 1835 134 10. The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia, who escaped from Richmond ... Slave Life in the United States (1853) 149 14. James Baillie, In Memory of..., ca. 1845–1847 164 15. James Baillie ...
... slave narratives, sermons, lithographs, paintings, speeches, and photographs. It's hard to know what to make of this outpouring of evidence. Thirty years ago, historian of popular culture Lewis O. Saum warned against making facile ...
... Slavery in Virginia reveals that consumption and various respiratory diseases were leading causes of death among whites, slaves, and free blacks as well.41 Whomever it struck, consumption was a devilishly complex disease. Sometimes ...
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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 |