Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865-1900

The book explores the diverse memories of the American Civil War as expressed by five Northern writers over four decades. It highlights the rhetorical power of James Russell Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode, the irony in Herman Melville's poetry, Henry James's themes of reconciliation in "The Bostonians," and Ambrose Bierce's short stories. The examination culminates with Paul Laurence Dunbar's elegy "Robert Gould Shaw," showcasing how these authors grappled with the war's legacy and its implications for race and national identity in postwar America.