Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
SpringerLink
Log in

Re-Enacting the American Civil War: Conflict, Simulation and the Sacred

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Re-enchanting Nationalisms

  • 587 Accesses

Abstract

By examining the recreational pursuit of American Civil War re-enacting this chapter furthers our ritual comprehension of the role that contemporary leisure can play in re-enchanting national history. In this case we explore re-enchantment as it occurs in a partisan way through provoking social conflict and facilitating activism. Over the last two decades, American Civil War battle re-enacting has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities in the United States with an estimated 50,000 participants. However, our understanding of its cultural and political significance has been limited by postmodern scholarship that casts it as inherently superficial in terms of its role in the formation of historical meaning. In contrast, this chapter points to the ideological significance of Civil War re-enacting by empirically detailing how performance factors allow for a new type of engagement with the nation and outlining how this symbolic experience motivates activism within new right wing politics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Agnew, V. (2007). History’s affect turn: Historical reenactment and its work in the present. Rethinking History, 11(3), 299–312.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, J.C. (2003). The meanings of social life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, J.C. (2004a). Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 527–573.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, J.C. (2004b). From the depths of despair: Performance and counter-performance on september 11th. Sociological Theory, 22(1), 88–105.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Allred, R. (2009). Battles without bullets: Civil War re-enactments and American culture. New York: Praeger.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, J. (1982). Living history: Simulating everyday life in living museums. American Quarterly, 34, 290–306.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, J. (1985). The living history sourcebook. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barr, J. (2005). Dumbing down intellectual culture. Museum and Society, 3, 98–114.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e).

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudrillard, J. (1988). America. New York: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in fragments: Essays in postmodern morality. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Z. (2000). Modernity and the holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Z. (2008). Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumers? Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bell, V. (2007). Culture and performance: The challenge of ethics, politics and feminist theory. Oxford: Berg.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berezin, M. (1997). Making the fascist self: The political culture of inter-war Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blanton, D., & Cook, L.M. (2002). They fought like demons: Women soldiers in the Civil War. Banton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bodnar, J. (1992). Remaking America: Public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boltanski, L., & Chiiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruner, E. (1994). Abraham Lincoln as authentic reproduction: A critique of postmodernism. American Anthropologist, 96(2), 397–415.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butcher, J. (2003). The moralisation of tourism. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, J. (1999) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, J. (2009) Nation-State belonging among Asian Australians and the question of transnationalism. Current Sociology, 57(1): 26–47.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conway, B. (2007) Moving through time and space: Performing bodies in derry, Northern Ireland. Journal of Historical Sociology, 20(2): 103–125.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crang, M. (1996) Magic kingdom or a quixotic quest for authenticity? Annals of Tourism Research, 23(2): 415–431.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Daugbjerg, M. (2013). Patchworking the past: materiality, touch and the assembling of ‘experience’ in American Civil War re-enactment. International Journal of Heritage Studies. doi:10.1080/13527258.2013.848820

    Google Scholar 

  • DiMaggio, P., Evans, J., & Bryson, B. (1996). ‘Have Americans’ social attitudes become more polarized? American Journal of Sociology, 102, 690–755.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • During, S. (2007). Mimic toil: Eighteenth-century preconditions for modern historical reenactment. Rethinking History, 11(3), 313–333.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Etzioni, A. (2000). Towards a theory of public ritual. Sociological Theorym, 18(1): 40–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eyerman, R. (2002). Cultural trauma: Slavery and the formation of african american identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eyerman, R., & Jamison, A. (1991). Social movements: A cognitive approach. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Farmer, J.O. (2005). Playing rebels: Reenactment as nostalgia and defense of the confederacy in the battle of Aiken. Southern Cultures, 11(1): 46–73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fenton, S. (2007). Indifference towards national identity: what young adults think about being English and British. Nations and Nationalism, 13(2): 321–339.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fields-White, M. (2011). Black Civil War Re-enactors Reclaim History The Root Posted: May 5, 2011 at 12:46 AM. http://www.theroot.com/views/black-civil-war-re-enactors?page=0,2. Accessed 19 Jan 2012

  • Gable, E., & Handler, R. (2000). Public history, private memory: Notes from the ethnography of colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 65(2), 237–252.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, C. (1972). Deep play: Notes on the balinese cockfight. Daedalus, 101(1): 1–37.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, C. (1973). Interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, J.W. (1994). Warrior dreams: Paramilitary culture in Post-Vietnam America. New York: Hill and Wang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gray Meets Blue Again in ‘Battle’ (1913). The chicago daily tribune, July 4, p. 4.

    Google Scholar 

  • Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere (trans: T. Burger). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Habermas, J., & Ben-Habib, S. (1981). Modernity versus postmodernity. New German Critique, 22, 3–14.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hadden, R.L. (1996). Reliving the Civil War: A reenactor’s handbook. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hall, D. (1994). Civil War reenactors and the postmodern sense of history. Journal of American Culture, 17(3):7–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Handler, R., & Saxton, W. (1988). Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, narrative and the quest for authenticity in ‘living history’. Cultural Anthropology, 3(3), 242–260.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hart, L. (2007). Authentic recreation: Living history and leisure. Museum and Society, 5(2), 103–124.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hobsbawm, E. (1983). Introduction: Inventing traditions. In E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (Eds.), The Invention of Tradition (pp. 1–14). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hochschild, A.R. (1990). Ideology and emotion management. In T.D. Kemper (Ed.), Research agendas in the sociology of emotions (pp. 117–142). Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Horwitz, T. (1998). Confederates in the attic: Dispatches from the unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hunt, S.J. (2004). Acting the part: ‘Living History’ as a serious leisure pursuit. Leisure Studies, 23(4), 387–403.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hunter, J.D. (1991). Culture wars. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hunter, J.D. (2006). The enduring culture war. In J.D. Hunter & A. Wolfe (Eds.), Is there a culture war? (pp. 10–40). Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hurdle, J. (2013). At Gettysburg, a battle of history vs. modernity. The New York Times. 23 August. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/us/at-gettysburg-a-battle-of-history-vs-modernity.html?_r=0. Accessed 7 Jan 2014.

  • Jacobs, R. (2000). Race, media and the crisis of civil society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaufman, W. (2006). The Civil War in american culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Luhr, E. (2009). Witnessing Suburbia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyotard, J. (1984). The postmodern condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacCannell, D. (2001). Tourist agency. Tourist Studies, 1(1), 23–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maggelssen, S. (2007). Living history museums: Undoing history through performance. Lanhan: Scarecrow Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mast, J. (2006). The cultural pragmatics of event-ness: “The Clinton/Lewinsky Affair”. In Alexander, J.C., Giesen, B., & Mast, J.L. (Eds.), Social performance: Symbolic action, cultural pragmatics and ritual (pp. 115–145). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • McAlister, M. (2003). Prophecy, politics and the popular: The left behind series and christian fundamentalism’s new world order. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 102(4), 773–798.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meethan, K. (2001). Tourism in a global society. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nash, K. (2008). Global citizenship as showbusiness: The cultural politics of make poverty history. Media, culture and society, 30(2), 167–181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ohio Fireworks Company. (1961). Charleston Evening Post 13 April. Reproduced at the United States National Archives, July 1999. Public Information Office. (1962). Atlantic Amphibious Training Command, News Release from Dave Joachim regarding Monitor & Merrimac re-enactment, February 28. Reproduced at the United States National Archives, July 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Radtchenko, D. (2006). Simulating the past: Reenactment and the quest for truth in Russia. Rethinking History, 10(1), 127–148.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Riley, S.C.E, Griffin, C, & Morey, Y. (2010). The case for ‘everyday politics. Sociology, 44(2), 345–363.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Robertson, J. (1962). Letter from James I Robertson, Executive Director of Civil War Centennial Commission, to Congressman Charles Mathias, August 30. Reproduced at the United States National Archives, July 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schneider, R. (2011). Performing remains: Art and war in times of theatrical re-enactment. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwartz, B. (1997). Collective memory and history: How Abraham Lincoln became a symbol of racial equality. The Sociological Quarterly, 38(3), 469–496.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schwartz, B. (2008). Collective memory and abortive commemoration: Presidents’ day and the American holidays calendar. Social Research, 75(1), 75–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Singleton, A. (2004). Good advice for godly men: Oppressed men in christian men’s self help literature. Journal of Gender Studies, 13(2), 153–164.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, A.D. (1986). The ethnic origins of nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stanton, C. (1999). Values and perceptions: The battle over battles. In Reenactors in the Parks. http://www.nps.gov/revwar/reenactors/Sect. 2.pdf. Accessed 15 June 2014.

  • Strauss, M.D. (2003). Identity construction among confederate civil war reenactors: A study of dress, stage props, and discourse. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 21(4), 149–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sturken, M. (2007). Tourists of history: Memory, kitsch, and consumerism from Oklahoma City to ground zero. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition (pp. 25–74). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ten Questions for Women in the Ranks (2014). Camp chase gazette 25 July. http://www.campchase.com/?p=137265. Accessed 18 Sept 2014.

  • Thompson, J. (2004). Inside the world of 20th -Century war reenactors. Washington DC: Smithsonian Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tivers, J. (2002). Performing heritage: The use of live ‘actors’ in heritage presentations. Leisure Studies, 21, 187–200.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process. Chicago: Aldine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Turner, R. (1990). Bloodless battles, the civil war re-enacted. Drama Review, 34, 123–136.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2012). The tourist gaze 3.0. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vertovec, S. (2009). Transnationalism. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Voase, R. (1999). ‘Consuming’ tourist sites/sights: A note on York. Leisure Studies, 18(4), 289–296.

    Google Scholar 

  • Walsh, K. (1992). The representation of the past: Museums and heritage in the post-modern world. New York: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Weber, M. (1992). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • West, B. (2008a). Collective memory and crisis: The 2002 Bali bombing, national heroic archetypes and the counter narrative of cosmopolitan nationalism. Journal of Sociology, 44(4), 337–353.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • West, B. (2008b). Enchanting pasts: The role of international civil religious pilgrimage in reimagining national collective memory. Sociological Theory, 26(3), 258–270.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, E. (1999). Disarming the nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zerubavel, E. (1991). The fine line. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Brad West

Authors
  1. Brad West
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Brad West .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

West, B. (2015). Re-Enacting the American Civil War: Conflict, Simulation and the Sacred. In: Re-enchanting Nationalisms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2513-1_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation