Leader
Eliza RichardsAssociate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
During the Civil War, Americans, North and South, were surrounded by death. Battle claimed over 600,000 lives. A similar casualty rate in today’s America would result in about 6 million deaths. Just as we would struggle to make sense of such massive tragedy, our countrymen did 150 years ago. And then, as now, new communications technologies brought events into people’s lives with unprecedented speed and immediacy.
How did innovations in journalism and photography heighten the impact of the War’s carnage on the home fronts? How did news and images from the battlefield challenge nineteenth-century beliefs about death and burial? And how did they challenge people to find meaning in the War?
Presentation PDF
Download the presentation PDF.Online Evaluation
Online evaluation for seminar participants.Technical Help
Visit our technical specifications page for information about the seminar forum and classroom.
View a brief introduction to AIC online seminars.
Assigned Readings
- “In Time of War,” Harper’s Weekly, 1863
- Specimen Days, Walt Whitman, 1892 (excerpt)
- “Bread and the Newspaper,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Atlantic Monthly, 1861 (excerpt)
- “Cavalry Crossing a Ford,” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891
- “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown.” Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891
- “Brady's Photographs,” (review) The New York Times, 1862
- “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Atlantic Monthly, 1863
- “Story of Antietam,” George Smalley, New York Tribune, 1862
- “After All,” (poem) William Winter, 1862
- “After the Battle of Antietam,” Harper’s Weekly, 1863
- The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1862-64 (excerpts)
- The Poems of Emily Dickinson, selected Civil War poems