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A 2020 BookAuthority selection for best new American Civil War books

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead.

In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Lincoln''s Promise

Part 1. Storage

1. Where the Grapes of Wrath Are Stored

2. The Nation, a Monument of Empire

3. Remembering Domestic Foreign Spaces

Part 2. Retrieval

4. Retrieve the Maine!

5. Memories of a Foreign Land

Part 3. Communication

6. Exiles of American Cultural Memory

7. Cultural Memory in the Information Age

8. That Cause Shall Not Be Betrayed

9. Listening to Empire

Epilogue: Reclaiming Lincoln''s Promise?

Appendix A: Stops in D. H. Rhodes''s Tour of the Philippines

Appendix B: Stops in F. S. Croggon''s Tour of the Philippines

Notes

Bibliography

Index