| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Shirley Samuels. Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 186. $49.95.
A study of Civil War iconography is long overdue. The period from 1861–1865 witnessed a vast outpouring of images that sought simultaneously to digest and to direct the war experience. Illustrated newspapers, songsheets, stationery, cartoons, banners, stamps, currency, and photographic exhibits brought Americans face to face with themselves and their war in new ways. As with gender relations and race relations, the country's symbol system was destabilized by the conflict, and the slippages are telling.	1
Shirley Samuels offers a fertile reading of that symbol system and its slippages. Examining texts of all types—novels, statues, and images—she lays bare the preoccupying anxieties Americans sought so avidly to deny in their presentations of a coherent national self. During the war, gender role reversals, free slaves, and a potential unnationing created a reinforcing discombobulation of the national enterprise that could not be denied in wartime self-imaginings. Thus the war's iconography, according to Samuels, reveals what she calls "substitution panic": the tendency of allegory merely to displace and occasionally to deepen the very anxieties it seeks to assuage.	. . .

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