In Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America, James Marten and Caroline E. Janney have assembled an assortment of talented historians who show how the Civil War “could in fact be bought, sold, and perhaps sold once more” by insightfully analyzing material objects from the late nineteenth century (252). The collection’s various authors focus on objects ranging from the infamous Libby Prison—sold and transported, brick by brick, from Richmond, Virginia, to Chicago, Illinois—to Confederate veterans’ uniforms and three-dimensional photographs of the war dead. By doing so, this book illustrates how the consumption of material objects brought Civil War memory into the intimate and banal domestic spaces of everyday, middle-class Americans.

Each of the collection’s authors is well versed in writing cultural history. The thick description they deploy often leads to clever and unanticipated interpretations. Jonathan S. Jones’s exploration of veterans who sought cures for wartime opium addictions highlights how unregulated capitalism led broken men to waste fortune and health on elixirs secretly laced with opium and morphine additives. Shae Smith Cox’s discussion of replica Confederate veterans’ uniforms shows how many “wore” a false history of a unified Confederacy on their backs. Those who bore such at Confederate pageants and reunions showcased a “propaganda play” that helped legitimize the Lost Cause narrative and aided a national reconciliation (87). In general, the collected essays are more interested in how Gilded Age Americans tied their identities to the consumption of Civil War–themed memorabilia than how Americans remembered the Civil War itself. Authors, for instance, dutifully and consistently cite classic works of Gilded Age historiography such as Jackson Lears’s Fables of Abundance, Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization, and Kristin L. Hoganson’s Consumers’ Imperium. Kevin R. Caprice’s essay on “veteranhood,” which describes how veterans exhibited their veteran status through the acquisition of pensions as well as collectibles such as watches and rings, argues that veterans crafted a culture of masculinity “by [not] only looking backward; the veterans actively curated their identity, in this case through the items they earned, by trying to define for themselves where they fit in the world that followed the Civil War” (60).

This collection does not carry the conversation much further beyond a basic cultural analysis. Thick description overshadows political and racial narratives, for instance. How did African Americans participate in the consumption of memorabilia? Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick’s examination of Milton Bradley’s “Myriopticon,” James Marten’s handling of the Civil War lecturer circuit, and Caroline E. Janney’s brief history of cycloramas—all of which are outstanding—are the few contributions that deal with racialized depictions of African Americans. But how did middle-class consumption of Civil War memorabilia help construct a politics of Jim Crow and a culture of segregation? A chapter on the business surrounding Confederate monuments, for instance, would have greatly bolstered the collection. Similarly, Natalie Sweet’s superb essay on Duke cigarettes, whose packs included trading cards with biographies of popular Civil War generals, illuminates how corporations could develop popular marketing strategies around innovative and interactive memorabilia. But further inquiry into how African American labor propped up the tobacco industry might have broadened the context of how Americans consumed tobacco products. Amanda Brickell Bellows’s piece on the visual media that marketed reunion and reconciliation perhaps does the most of any essay to tie middle-class consumption to the production of segregation and Jim Crow consumerism. Trading cards and ephemera from commercial advertisements and marketing campaigns often indulged themselves in offensive racial stereotypes. While these stereotypes clearly undermined civil rights and racial equality, there is room for an accompanying essay on the more ghastly visual marketplace that bought and sold postcards and even body parts of lynching victims, helping to spread the visual culture of racial violence across the country.

When Americans imagined the world beyond the nation’s borders, did they impose the domestic attitudes exhibited in their collected ephemera onto foreign people and places? In other words, did Civil War memorabilia help Americans transition from reunion to empire? This is a tantalizing proposition that deserves consideration especially in light of debates over the invasion of Cuba and the occupation of the Philippines. Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White contribute an excellent piece on how corporations, especially those selling domestic and farm wares, exploited the Civil War’s ironclad ships—the Monitor and Merrimack—to advertise the quality and dependability of appliances ranging from “the Little Monitor” sewing machine to “Ironclad” pots and pans and even lawn mowers (119–20). Did the cultural domestication of these warships establish a trope that primed Americans to accept the American empire? David K. Thomson’s imaginative essay on Confederate debt held in bonds by British bankers, who tried to force the U.S. federal government to make good on bad Confederate debts even after the First World War, reveals how postwar Republicans used national debt and other financial instruments to refashion the American economy toward industrialization. Looking beyond America’s borders might also help to illuminate the country’s overseas financial empire that only grew in the wake of World War I.

Each of these short essays, exhibiting the thick description common to cultural history, helps the collection to satisfy its stated ambitions. The cultivation of reunionism through the pursuit of material objects is a useful study, and these essays show how the buying and selling of everyday domestic products perpetuated reunionism. The essays engage the cultural Gilded Age histories of Lears, Bederman, and Hoganson more than the memory-based Civil War histories of Nina Silber and David Blight. But they do so effectively and skillfully. By neatly, intelligently, and consistently connecting consumer habits with Civil War memorabilia, Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America offers much for scholars, students, and even the general public.