Booknotes: A Nation Unraveled

New Arrival:

• A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era by Sarah Jones Weicksel (UNC Press, 2026).

Of course, multidisciplinary study of material culture artifacts has long been central to the archaeological investigation of Civil War-associated sites such as army encampments, battlefields, buildings, sunken vessels, and more. Much more recent is the uptick in scholarly examination, using innovative new angles and perspectives, of non-archaeologically obtained material items of study such as preserved period clothing and wartime ephemera. In this group resides Sarah Jones Weicksel's A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era.

From the description: "During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history." "Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing—from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat—had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult."

With, as the saying goes, pictures being worth a thousand words, it behooves anyone presenting a material culture study to include images that fully reveal what they're writing about, and Weicksel's study doesn't skimp on that element. Her book's seventy-eight illustrations include images of shirts, uniforms, buttons, body armor, slippers, aprons, dresses, ribbons, earrings, coats, undergarments, and more.

Weicksel's investigation "is divided into four parts ["Making," "Wearing," "Destroying," and "Saving] according to the life cycle of clothing and are roughly chronological, beginning with the adoption and production of army uniforms and ending with the preservation of clothing as relics of war" (pg. 11). Specifically, Making "focuses on how making clothing and dress culture were central to making war." Wearing "shifts the vantage point to consider how civilians confronted and felt the effects of war and emancipation through the clothes they wore." Destroying "addresses how war was waged and felt through acts of clothing destruction and defilement, and through the disintegration of dress practices." Finally, Saving "explores the broader phenomena of people keeping and preserving clothing--whether stolen or their own--to narrate, remember, and come to terms with war" (pp. 12-13).

In sum, Weicksel's contribution to the Civil War material culture literature "invites readers to understand how the war penetrated daily life by focusing on the intimate, visceral, material experiences that shaped how people moved through the world."