The Union's Culture Industry

Abstract: The cultural history of the Civil War North has flourished since the turn of the twenty-first century. Scholars have impeccably analyzed wartime texts and images to clarify Northern citizens' and soldiers' shared ideological and emotional commitments. Yet, these historians have not fully reckoned with the interconnected nature of culture production in genres such as blackface minstrelsy, lithography, illustrated newspapers, photography, and theater through which Northerners made, circulated, used, and experienced culture commodities. This economic system of culture production often created or illuminated social conflict and ambiguous cultural meaning. The culture industry, a concept that has animated debate among historians of popular culture for decades, holds great potential for Civil War historians to open new perspectives on the experiences of Union soldiers and citizens and the ways they did cultural work to make the meanings of class and self-making, race and emancipation, gender and the household, and the war itself.