Synopses & Reviews
Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field,
So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War-era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union.
Broadly defining "intellectuals" to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed.
Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners' conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state?
Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war.
Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation's intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.
Review
"The Civil War and Reconstruction has been called the second American revolution, and this fascinating collection reminds us that this era revolutionized American thought and culture. From medicine to education, from perception to memory, So Conceived and So Dedicated opens our eyes and minds to how Americans at the time saw and thought about what the Civil War meant to them."--Michael Green, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Synopsis
This collection of scholarly essays updates and revitalizes the field of intellectual history as a tribute to George M. Fredrickson's
The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union, a pioneering book without rival in the fifty years since its publication. Using new approaches and expanding the subjects for study beyond the elite New England Brahmin classes that formed the basis for Fredrickson's work, this volume offers fresh interpretations for the study of medicine, law, race, ethnicity and identity, art, nationalism, and education. The contributors answer vital questions about the role of the Civil War in transforming thought, altering the relationship of individuals to the nation, promoting changes in identity, and shaping the fields of medicine, education, and history.
Kathryn Meier and Susan-Mary Grant examine how Sanitary Commission doctors and Union surgeons addressed challenges to their professional standing during the war. Richard Newman argues that the language of health helped northerners explain secession, emancipation, and its consequences. Richard Miller's mini-biography of John Codman Ropes describes how this contemporary lawyer sought to create a "true history" of the Civil War. Julie Mujic and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai's essays center on college campuses where wartime struggles for survival soon turned into battles over the lessons of the conflict. Niki Lefebvre demonstrates how an artist's pencil could help northerners conceive of African Americans as soldiers as well as citizens. David Zimring, Christian Samito, and William Kurtz explore how the war forced individuals to grapple with questions about loyalty and identity.
The breadth and scope of these essays demonstrate both the vibrancy of intellectual life in the Civil War Era North and the lasting legacy of George Fredrickson's work.
About the Author
Lorien L. Foote is Associate Professor at the University of Central Arkansas and the author of
The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010) and
Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003).
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai is an assistant professor of history at Angelo State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia where he also worked at the Virginia Center for Digital History. His essays have been published in Maine History, The Massachusetts Historical Review, and Children and Youth During the Civil War Era (New York University Press, 2012). He has received research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. His work revolves around the development of masculine identity and nationalism.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Joan Waugh 000
"So Conceived and So Dedicated": Historians and Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era
Lorien Foote 000
U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care
Kathryn Shively Meier 000
Civil War Cybernetics: Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union
Susan-Mary Grant 000
To Save the Afflicted Union: Race, Civic Health, and the Sanitary Front
Richard Newman 000
John Codman Ropes: A Lawyer's Historian
Richard F. Miller 000
Save a School to Save a Nation: Faculty Responses to the Civil War at Midwestern Universities
Julie Mujic 000
Lessons of War: Three Civil War Veterans and the Goals of Post-War Education
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai 000
"The Rebels' Last Device": Theodore R. Davis and Faithful Representations of Black Soldiers During the Civil War
Niki Lefebvre 000
For Their Adopted Home: Native Northerners in the South During the Secession Crisis
David Zimring 000
Thomas F. Meagher, Patrick R. Guiney, and the Meaning of the Civil War for Irish America: The Questions of Nationalism, Citizenship, and Human Rights
Christian G. Samito 000
"This most unholy and destructive war": Catholic Intellectuals and the Limits of Catholic Patriotism
William Kurtz 000
Notes 000
List of Contributors 000
Index 000