Haunted by the Civil War: Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States

How the legacy of the Civil War—as presented by writers, poets, and artists of the time—has shaped American visions of democracy

In Haunted by the Civil War, Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America’s cataclysmic sundering. Juxtaposing these texts with images—ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of p...