Review
Weirding the War is an eclectic mix of absorbing essays on the American Civil War. It shatters conventional paradigms, asking new questions and offering fresh insights into a war that continues to fascinate, even obsess, both academic and popular audiences.
-- Victoria Bynum ― author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies
Saying something truly new about the American Civil War seems impossible, but here is a book that offers an explosion of new perspectives and insights, often surprising and sometimes disturbing. Read this book and you will never be able to imagine again whatever Civil War you imagined before.
-- Edward L. Ayers ― winner of the Bancroft Prize for In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863
Emphasizing selfishness and its victims, not sacrifice, the authors provide insights into the war's cultural and social history by looking at persons on the margins, oftentimes considered 'weird' by society's mainstream. . . . Weirding the War matters not because its characters exhibited oddities or peculiarities, but rather because of their intensely human, commonplace experiences, strengths and weaknesses. Their mundane stories remind us of the 'weirdness' of war generally and the connection between individuals in the past and ourselves.
-- John David Smith ― News & Observer
Berry and his contributors manage to accomplish their goal and weird the Civil War. . . . Ironically, it is by breaking Civil War history from the limitations of the Civil War narrative that we can introduce twenty-first-century Americans to their counterparts in the nineteenth century―weird.
-- Barbara A. Gannon ― Journal of American History
Weirding the War proves that there are still many questions left to be asked and answered about this popular time in American history. These essays collected by Dr. Stephen Berry expand the boundaries of what historians have looked at, and bring new ideas to the forefront of current Civil War thinking.
-- Kristopher Allen ― Southern Historian
[Berry’s] manifesto-like introduction calls for new questions, new themes, and new topics that turn upside down what we think we know about the [Civil War]. . . . The animating force behind these essays, and the books that will follow, is to nudge students, buffs, and popular audiences to replace the Civil War’s inspirational story with the darker version.
-- Joan Waugh ― Journal of Southern History
Overall, whether in soldier, civilian, or veteran studies, the future direction of the new military history emanates from Weirding the War.
-- Matthew E. Stanley ― Register of the Kentucky Historical Society Review
Weirding the War is an eclectic mix of absorbing essays on the American Civil War. It shatters conventional paradigms, asking new questions and offering fresh insights into a war that continues to fascinate, even obsess, both academic and popular audiences.
Saying something truly new about the American Civil War seems impossible, but here is a book that offers an explosion of new perspectives and insights, often surprising and sometimes disturbing. Read this book and you will never be able to imagine again whatever Civil War you imagined before.
Emphasizing selfishness and its victims, not sacrifice, the authors provide insights into the war's cultural and social history by looking at persons on the margins, oftentimes considered 'weird' by society's mainstream. . . . Weirding the War matters not because its characters exhibited oddities or peculiarities, but rather because of their intensely human, commonplace experiences, strengths and weaknesses. Their mundane stories remind us of the 'weirdness' of war generally and the connection between individuals in the past and ourselves.
Berry and his contributors manage to accomplish their goal and weird the Civil War. . . . Ironically, it is by breaking Civil War history from the limitations of the Civil War narrative that we can introduce twenty-first-century Americans to their counterparts in the nineteenth century-weird.
Weirding the War proves that there are still many questions left to be asked and answered about this popular time in American history. These essays collected by Dr. Stephen Berry expand the boundaries of what historians have looked at, and bring new ideas to the forefront of current Civil War thinking.
[Berry's] manifesto-like introduction calls for new questions, new themes, and new topics that turn upside down what we think we know about the [Civil War]. . . . The animating force behind these essays, and the books that will follow, is to nudge students, buffs, and popular audiences to replace the Civil War's inspirational story with the darker version.
Overall, whether in soldier, civilian, or veteran studies, the future direction of the new military history emanates from Weirding the War.
About the Author
BRIAN CRAIG MILLER is an associate professor of history at Emporia State University. He is the forthcoming editor of the journal Civil War History and the author of John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory and The American Memory: Americans and Their History to 1877.
LEEANN WHITES is the editor of Ohio Valley History and professor emerita of history at the University of Missouri. She is the author of The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender (Georgia)and Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South and coeditor of Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War and Women in Missouri History: In Search of Power and Influence.
MEGAN KATE NELSON is a writer, historian, and cultural critic. Based in Lincoln, Massachusetts, she has written about Civil War and western history for a number of national publications. Nelson also writes a regular column on Civil War popular culture, “Stereoscope,” for Civil War Monitor, and her blog, Historista examines the “surprising and weird ways that people engage with history in everyday life.” Nelson is also the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia). She has taught at Texas Tech University; California State University, Fullerton; Harvard University; and Brown University.
STEVEN E. NASH is an associate professor of history at East Tennessee State University and the author of Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains.
