Courses

Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville—so much great poetry and prose came out of the American Civil War. In the visual arts, the same was the case. Winslow Homer painted sharpshooters poised amid leafy branches. Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan shockingly photographed the dead at Antietam and Gettysburg. In the theater, the famous actress Charlotte Cushman wowed an audience as Lady Macbeth in a one-night charity performance of Shakespeare’s play in Washington, DC, in 1863.

And beyond these art forms, there was the daily round of life, the experience of soldiers and slaves, of women in Richmond, Washington DC, and elsewhere—all art forms of their own kind, descended to us in diaries, medals, and uniforms; in cemeteries, fragments of shrapnel found in fields; in the haunting space of Ford’s Theatre, where John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865.

Together, all these places and pictures and poems and stories create a mosaic of life between 1861 and 1865 and beyond—a mosaic that’s made to this day, in the war’s ongoing political and poetic aftereffects, including most recently, the defacing and removal of Confederate statues in Richmond and other places in 2020 and the melting down of the city’s Robert E. Lee equestrian sculpture in 2023.

Focusing on poems, paintings, and photographs, but also on the lived experience of Americans during the war, the course is a personal and poetic journey into the past, told by Alexander Nemerov. More than that, it is a chance for students to reflect on their own personal and emotional connection to the American past.