During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers' bodies were transformed into "dead heaps of ruins," novel sights in the southern landscape. How did this happen, and why? And what did Americans-northern and southern, black and white, male and female-make of this proliferation of ruins? Ruin Nation is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change. Megan Kate Nelson examines the narratives and images that Americans produced as they confronted the war's destructiveness. Architectural ruins-cities and houses-dominated the stories that soldiers and civilians told about the "savage" behavior of men and the invasions of domestic privacy. The ruins of living things-trees and bodies-also provoked discussion and debate. People who witnessed forests and men being blown apart were plagued by anxieties about the impact of wartime technologies on nature and on individual identities. The obliteration of cities, houses, trees, and men was a shared experience. Nelson shows that this is one of the ironies of the war's ruination-in a time of the most extreme national divisiveness people found common ground as they considered the war's costs. And yet, very few of these ruins still exist, suggesting that the destructive practices that dominated the experiences of Americans during the Civil War have been erased from our national consciousness.
"An important new contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history, environmental history, Civil War history, and American studies scholarship. Among the book's many strengths are its interdisciplinary approach, showing a sophisticated understanding of fields ranging from visual culture to gender studies to the history of science; a truly impressive base of archival research; a very clear writi
Aaron Sachs
"Nelson brings a truly original set of problems and questions to a thoroughly canvassed period of U.S. history. Engaging, deeply researched, and lucidly and fluently written, her book is bound to interest scholars and a broader readership alike."
Karen Halttunen
"Megan Kate Nelson has found a fresh way to consider the destruction caused by the Civil War. In often compelling prose, she uses the idea of ruins to consider how we construct meaning from chaos and loss. Through this concept she explores the scars left by combat on not only objects like homes but also on people, such as amputees. In the symbolism of ruins, she finds the intersection of how we co
