In The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture, Allison M. Johnson considers the ubiquitous images of bodies—white and black, male and female, soldier and civilian—that appear throughout newspapers, lithographs, poems, and other texts circulated during and in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Rather than dwelling on the work of well-known authors, The Scars We Carve uncovers a powerful archive of Civil War–era print culture in which the individual body and its component parts, marked by violence or imbued with rhetorical power, testify to the horrors of war and the lasting impact of the internecine conflict. The Civil War brought about vast changes to the nation’s political, social, racial, and gender identities, and Johnson argues that print culture conveyed these changes to readers through depictions of nonnormative bodies. She focuses on images portrayed in the pages of newspapers and journals, in the left-handed writing of recent amputees who participated in penmanship contests, and in the accounts of anonymous poets and storytellers. Johnson reveals how allegories of the feminine body as a representation of liberty and the nation carved out a place for women in public and political realms, while depictions of slaves and black soldiers justified black manhood and citizenship in the midst of sectional crisis. By highlighting the extent to which the violence of the conflict marked the physical experience of American citizens, as well as the geographic and symbolic bodies of the republic, The Scars We Carve diverges from narratives of the Civil War that stress ideological abstraction, showing instead that the era’s print culture contains a literary and visual record of the war that is embodied and individualized.

"`The Scars We Carve': Disruptive Bodies in Civil War Literature" examines the presence of physical forms, marks, and scars in periodical literature produced during and shortly after the war in order to illuminate the ubiquity and significance of bodies in the literary record of the war. Presenting substantial archival evidence of how American civilians and combatants interacted with and represented the physical effects of war, this dissertation focuses especially on the disruptive bodies of injured and maimed combatants, African American soldiers, and war-torn women. The critical consensus on Civil War literature emphasizes the effacement of the individual in sentimental narratives of nationhood, sacrifice, and reconciliation. This study refutes and complicates such readings by demonstrating the rhetorical and discursive power of bodies touched and shaped by war. Though sentimentality did persist and many writers continued to write about war deaths in the same way they wrote about non-war deaths, a large number of Americans resisted reintegrative, reconciliatory, and apologist narratives, underscoring instead the effects of the war on individuals. The destruction and upheaval of war disrupted and complicated traditional ways of understanding and depicting death and wounding; in many texts created during the war, soldiers' bodies refuse to rest quietly beneath the sod and missing limbs talk and tell of horror and suffering. The first chapter documents the ubiquity of female personifications of the Union and the Confederacy, examining the ways in which gender and nationality interact and intersect to assert that symbolic femininity is central to both sides' understandings of the conflict and its stakes. The second chapter proposes a new way of reading Whitman's Civil War poetry and prose, asserting that the bodies of dead and dying soldiers fill his pages, refusing to be ignored, silenced, or reintegrated into sentimental and reconciliatory conceptions of death and decay. The bodies of African American soldiers, the subject of the third chapter, disrupt and reject antebellum stereotypes of powerless slave bodies. Beginning with an analysis of literary and artistic depictions of slaves published during the first years of the war, the chapter traces the development of black men from slaves to soldiers to citizens in popular literature and visual culture. The left-handed penmanship contest that forms the focus of the final chapter also provides tangible evidence of the effects of war. Reading contest entries produced by amputees in conjunction with periodical poetry and prose focusing on amputation and its ramifications, this chapter underscores the centrality of the marked and maimed soldier body to the way in which soldiers and non-combatants understood and wrote about military service. "The Scars We Carve" brings to light a significant body of Civil War literature that disrupts or rejects narratives of reconciliation and records the horrors of war. In numerous poems and stories of the war, the individual body and its component parts, marked by violence or imbued with rhetorical power, testify to the "great evil" of war, the issues at stake in the conflict, and its lasting influence.

"I'm scared and scarred but I’ve survived" Tom Wilson was raised in the rough-and-tumble world of Hamilton—Steeltown— in the company of World War II vets, factory workers, fall-guy wrestlers and the deeply guarded secrets kept by his parents, Bunny and George. For decades Tom carved out a life for himself in shadows. He built an international music career and became a father, he battled demons and addiction, and he waited, hoping for the lies to cease and the truth to emerge. It would. And when it did, it would sweep up the St. Lawrence River to the Mohawk reserves of Quebec, on to the heights of the Manhattan skyline. With a rare gift for storytelling and an astonishing story to tell, Tom writes with unflinching honesty and extraordinary compassion about his search for the truth. It's a story about scars, about the ones that hurt us, and the ones that make us who we are. From Beautiful Scars: Even as a kid my existence as the son of Bunny and George Wilson seemed far-fetched to me. When I went over it in my head, none of it added up. The other kids on East 36th Street in Hamilton used to tell me stories of their mothers being pregnant and their newborn siblings coming home from the hospital. Nobody ever talked about Bunny's and my return from the hospital. In my mind my birth was like the nativity, only with gnarly dogs and dirty snow and a chipped picket fence and old blind people with short tempers and dim lights, ashtrays full of Export Plain cigarette butts and bottles of rum. Once, when I was about four, I asked Bunny, "How come I don't look anything like you and George? How come you are old and the other moms are young?" "There are secrets I know about you that I’ll take to my grave," she responded. And that pretty well finished that. Bunny built up a wall to protect her secrets, and as a result I built a wall to protect myself.

Two teenagers, two tales interwoven by a shared intrigue. Their distinct temperaments guide them along separate paths through a demanding chapter of youthful existence. As they confront adversities both solo and side by side, the longing for independence dances a delicate duet with the need for connection. The Scars We Bear delves into the tumultuous journey of adolescence, exploring what it truly demands not merely to navigate through it, but to flourish with resilience and newfound wisdom. Through trials and triumphs, our young protagonists unveil the essence of camaraderie and the indomitable spirit of youth in facing life’s early storms.

In 1930s Antwerp, having fled a pre war Poland with her family, Zoshia, a young Jewish girl, battles to survive intense persecution from the Nazis and bravely endangers her own life in order to help save others.

A Handbook on Walt Whitman that reflects the best new work in the field including chapters that set his work within the context of digital scholarship, discussion of new manuscript discoveries and transcriptions, exploration of environmental angles on Whitman, and a focus on disability studies.

Doctrine and Difference: The Thematic Scale of Classic American Literature aims to expand and deepen our knowledge into the inquiry of “contextual historicism,” observing writers of the American nineteenth century, and their vastly differing approaches to perceptions such as race, gender, and national identity. Ranging from the religious acuities of the first American Puritans to the more secularized literary awakening of the American Renaissance and into late-century texts that deliberately resist the limits of received religious and political opinion, this volume seeks to uncover a history of human thought within classic American Literature. This volume critically observes these survivable works of literature, presenting insight into the “difference” made by conversation, dispute, and dramatized self-doubt within novels and poems of the historical past.