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"" behaviour 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.
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