The ECW10 Series: The Civil War and Pop Culture

One of our intents with the Emerging Civil War 10th Anniversary Series was to collection “the best of ECW”: the best of our blog posts, Symposium talks, and podcast transcripts. We’ve updated them all, expanded some, and added notes, and we’ve sprinkled in some original content as well.

Our new The Civil War and Pop Culture breaks that mold a little. It contains the highest proportion of new material than any other of our ECW10 books.

Brian Matthew Jordan’s extended foreword provides excellent historical context for ways the war and pop culture have intersected. He gives particular attention to the work of the “Society for Correct Civil War Information,” a 1930s initiative led by a pair of daughters of a Union veteran. What a neat body of work for Brian to plumb! The power of his pen makes anything Brian reads time well spent, and

And then check out this collection of original material:

• Gary Adelman: “Nineteenth-Century Social Media: Civil War Photography Was 150 Years Ahead of the Game”
• John Coski: “The Confederate Flag in Popular Culture”
• Steve Davis: “The Gray Ghost on TV Made Me a Civil Warrior”
• Brian Steel Wills: “Charlton Heston’s Civil War”
• Kevin Levin: “Violence and Forgetting in the Crater”
• Steward Henderson: “Glory: Rediscovering the USCT in Popular Culture”
• Patrick Vecchio: “Driving Dixie Down”
• Ashley Webb: “Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, and Their Continued Influence”
• Scott Mingus: “Civil War Wargaming”
• Sean Michael Chick: “Gaming the Civil War”
• Tyler McGraw, The Unfiltered Historian: “Ready, Aim, Click!: A Look at the Civil War Through Video Games”
• Derek Maxfield: “Re-Creating War in Peaceful Fields: Catharsis Through Reenacting”
• Richard Heisler, Civil War Seattle: “The Civil War Art Boom (and Bust)”

Think about that for a second: Garry Adelman on Civil War photography! John Coski on the Confederate flag! Kevin Levin on the Crater! That’s aces.

We follow that up with some excellent “best of” material covering books, movies, TV shows, songs, games, and other ways we interact with the war. We have pieces from fourteen other historians covering topics from Gettysburg to Gone with the Wind, Stephen Crane to Steve Earle, college football to coal-black horses, from homespun to holiday villages.

Chris Heisey uses his camera to share some pictures of places associated with some of our favorite pop culture-related texts and experiences.

ECW Chief Historian Cecily Nelson Zander’s essay on Emily Dickinson is titled “The Civil War in Surprising Places.” But that could be a subtitle for this whole volume. The Civil War keeps showing up in surprising places, in ways that entertain, delight, provoke, and inspire. Sometimes it confuses and obfuscates. And SO often, it offers a vital portal for connecting people with American history.

Check out The Civil War and Pop Culture, co-edited with Jon Tracey, available now from Savas Beatie.