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Sarah J.
Purcell
.
Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era
.
Chapel Hill, NC
:
University of North Carolina Press
,
2022
. Pp.
338
. Paper $34.95.
Angela Esco Elder Converse University , US Email: angela.elder@converse.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 758–759, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae074
Published:
13 June 2024
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Angela Esco Elder, Sarah J. Purcell. Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 758–759, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae074
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In Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era, Sarah J. Purcell invites readers to join her in “walking alongside processions of mourners, peering over their shoulders to read newspaper articles about the dead, listening to eulogies, and gazing upon grave markers” to “see some of the most important ways that Americans expressed values” (9). Through a series of funeral case studies, this book reveals nineteenth-century funerals to be more than familial rituals, but rather public events that inspired political expressions and debates over American identity. Funerals not only honored legacies but often served as calls to action. In this book, Purcell argues that “public funerals, as cultural practices of collective mourning, helped to define American national identities in the second half of the nineteenth century, and they provide a lens for examining anew debates over competing strands of Civil War memory” (3).
The book consists of five chapters, tucked between a concise introduction and conclusion. Readers explore the politicized funerals of nine figures: Henry Clay, Elmer Ellsworth, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, George Peabody, Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner, Joseph Johnston, Frederick Douglass, and Winnie Davis. The analysis of Ellsworth’s and Jackson’s funerals, as events that reinforced national identities, Union and Confederate, is particularly convincing. “The Union Cause and the Lost Cause might be opposed, but the fact that they mirrored one another mattered immensely,” Purcell concludes (93–4). Both sides shed public tears, both held public funerals, both wrote of sacrifice and heroism. Even as the nation tore apart, the process of mourning would bring them together again.
Issue Section:
Reviews > CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
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