Twice-divided nation: The Civil War and national memory in the transatlantic world

Twice-Divided Nation: The Civil War and National Memory in the Transatlantic World explores the representation and commemoration of the American Civil War through an interdisciplinary and transatlantic frame. While Civil War memory typically appears either as a domestic drama of national separation and reunion or as a national conversion narrative from slavery to freedom, this dissertation reveals dominant strains of national war memory developing through Anglo-American communication and conflict. To many writers of the Civil War era, the U.S. appeared as a "twice-divided nation"--- threatened by British cultural influence as well as sectionalism---and as a nexus of larger disputes over the meaning of modern nationalism and the role of national literature in global Anglophonic culture. Concerns over the diminishment of traditional social structures in the emerging information age fueled these divisions and profoundly influenced the transatlantic representation and remembrance of the first large-scale modern war.;The project shows how the transatlantic cultural event that the British called "The American War" symbolically crystallized communal challenges surrounding the role of national memory and national literature in modern life. It demonstrates that the globalization of modern news in the late antebellum period exacerbated long-standing nationalist anxieties surrounding transatlantic influence and opened the way for two distinct modes of national memory. The study traces the development of these "presentist" and "traditionalist" forms of memory in transatlantic newspapers, poetry and public monuments that appeared during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Addressing audiences I that often spanned the Atlantic divide, figures such as Horace Greeley, William Howard Russell, A.J.B Beresford Hope, John William Jones, William Michael Rossetti, and Walt Whitman deployed images of a shared past as anchors of social stability in a time of unprecedented political upheavals. Ultimately, Twice-Divided Nation suggests that such commemorative efforts offered a sense of communal stability to mass audiences disconcerted by global information and the sort of national dissolution that the war itself exemplified.