Ruin Nation

Megan Kate Nelson. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Nelson defines a ruin as "a material whole that has violently broken into parts; enough of these parts must remain in situ, however, that the observer can recognize what they used to be." (2)  She argues that her book is "the first book to consider the evocative power of wartime ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change."  (9)  This book is intended as a cultural history of war drawing from a variety of disciplines and interpretive tracks.

Each of the four chapters considers a different type of "ruin"--cities; individual family homes; forests and trees; and wounded soldiers who suffered the loss of one or more limb, often to battlefield surgeons. The first two were the sort of "ruins" one normally thinks of, while the latter two were living things and therefore it's an interesting conceptual assertion by Nelson. In all four cases, however, she notes a commonality--the particular American experience of ruination would prove ephemeral, as Americans preferred rebuilding to preserving when possible--cities and houses were rebuilt, forests regrew, and disable veterans would eventually die.

The messages that ruins presented, and the narratives created to give them meaning, varied by example as well as time and place, but in general Nelson tries to argue that the very concept of ruination created a physical, visible landscape which Americans grappled with, assigning narrative meaning to lone chimneys (represented destroyed houses) and empty sleeves (representing war amputees) as well as to efforts to repair damage and restore or recreate this new world.

It's not entirely clear from her text that "ruination" is a concept which would have made sense at the time, not in the over-arching sense she gives it. Nor does her book lead from the four different topics to a more cohesive vision at the end. All the same, this is an interesting way of trying to recreate the way in which the war was experienced at the time--a messier reality than the pristine lawns of modern Civil War battlefield sites would suggest.