Professor Shirley Samuels publishes new book, Haunted by the Civil War
In Haunted by the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2025), Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America’s cataclysmic sundering.
Juxtaposing these texts with images—ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of political controversies—Samuels argues that the Civil War still haunts our attitudes toward democracy. The recent toppling of Confederate monuments, the continuing protests over racial and sexual discrimination, immigration, and Indigenous land rights: each of these forms part of the war’s legacy.
Examining the fraught deliberations about an ideal American democracy in the early republic, Samuels turns to the language of sensation in the poetry of Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman alongside Lincoln’s relation to the poetic and visual culture of his time.
She considers the haunted afterlives of war in the work of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as in popular nineteenth-century inspirational fiction. And she investigates the literature of men at sea (and on rivers, enabling both connection and escape), as seen in Melville and Mark Twain, while examining women’s wartime work and experience, in writings by Gilman and Frances Harper.
Why does the Civil War still haunt us? To find the answer, Samuels identifies not only the ghosts that cannot rest but also the cultural practices that name them.
Shirley Samuels is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies, the Picket Family Chair of the Literatures in English Department, and faculty in the Department of History of Art at Cornell University. She is the author of Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War and Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691248578/haunted-by-the-civil-war
