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The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past. Jim Cullen. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. $29.95 cloth.
Perhaps no event in American history has captured the popular imagination more than the Civil War. Depictions of the war in fiction, film, and other media reach tens of millions of people in the United States and abroad, far larger audiences than do professional historians. In The Civil War in Popular Culture, Jim Cullen explores popular interpretations of the war during the twentieth century, in the process revealing much about the cultural legacy of the war.
Cullen contends that popular portrayals of the Civil War reflect the contemporary concerns of the artists and their audiences, and uses five examples to illustrate this idea: In his poetry, Carl Sandburg intended his depiction of Abraham Lincoln to soothe concern over the expansion of federal power during the Great Depression; Margaret...