American Literary and Cultural History in the Post-Civil War Era

On October 30, 2010, The New York Times ran the first post in what would become its enormously popular Disunion series. “It’s a bottomless treasure, this Civil War,” journalist Tony Horowitz enthused, “much of it encrusted in myth or still unexplored. Which is why,” he concluded, “it still claims our attention and remembrance.” The Times’s series editors banked on Horowitz’s reading of the national zeitgeist. They were smart. Disunion became “the most active series” in the paper’s Opinion section and its website received “more than 35 million unique monthly visitors” during its run. Times’s editors designed the series to offer “a multiplicity of perspectives,” calling upon esteemed scholars, journalists, and Civil War buffs to contribute new perspectives, commentary, and assessment of the war. Moreover, posts from readers in the comments section “added to the chorus of new voices and brought to life, for hundreds of thousands of people, the catalytic, near-catastrophic historic events that shaped our nation.” ¹