Reviewed by:

• Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown
• Joy M. Giguere

Thousands of monuments and other architectural structures that speak to martial valor, heroism, self-sacrifice, and virtue in all military conflicts dating back to the Revolutionary War define the American memorial landscape. For most observers, these monuments are reflective of a national culture shaped by a veneration of martial values embodied in monuments to those who fought for their home and country. As far as most Americans are concerned, national identity has always been infused by a love of the military, reverence for its leaders and for such symbols as the flag, and an enthusiasm to proclaim these sentiments in granite and bronze. While monuments do, indeed, convey such messages through their iconography and inscriptions, what they fail to effectively convey is the historical context in which they came to be made; the martial ideals they represent did not simply emerge out of a vacuum.

In Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, Thomas J. Brown argues that, despite a memorial landscape that speaks otherwise, the United States was forged during an era of iconoclastic distrust of monumental tributes as well as a general disdain for the military. It was only in the aftermath of the Civil War that Americans embraced the symbolism of a militarized nation. Early iconoclasm was rooted in the American Revolution itself, when in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence, colonists tore down effigies of King George III, many of them equestrian statues. For citizens [End Page 131] in the early years of the republic, such representational monuments smacked of monarchism and imperialism, and for many, the written word was a far greater memorial than any statue. The process of militarizing the national identity was neither immediate nor without its detractors, but by the early twentieth century, the Civil War monument had become a central locus for the interpretation of the war and for symbolizing the values of the modern nation.

The turn toward an American martial culture involved an evolution in public thinking about the sacrifices of soldiers and commanders during the Civil War. The earliest monuments, reflective of antebellum distrust of large-scale representative military memorials, were funereal in nature—they were efforts, first by veterans, and then by communities, to grapple with the enormity of the loss of life wrought by the Civil War. However, by the 1870s the general public was less interested in war deaths, and, as Brown notes in his introduction, “a second proliferation of monuments assumed a different cast” (p. 2). Where earlier monuments were dedicated to the war’s dead, memorials now commemorated both living and dead combatants, and they identified veterans “as exemplars of a robust, disciplined citizenry” (p. 2). The widespread use of allegorical figures in addition to soldier statues further imbued monuments with a visual rhetoric that peace could only be achieved through warfare. By the end of the nineteenth century, monuments to commanders—ironically, many of them equestrian—were dedicated to proclaim the value of hierarchical leadership and the generational veneration emerging between the young men who fought in the Spanish-American War and World War I and the graying (or deceased) heroes of the Civil War generation.

One phenomenon that sets the United States apart in the history of military memorialization is that both the Union and the former Confederacy—the victors and the vanquished—erected countless monuments in the decades after the Civil War. The ultimate result was twofold: first, that regardless of motivations to fight, the heroism and valor exhibited by soldiers on both sides was equally valid; and second, that ethnocentrism and white supremacism informed the depiction of the nation’s heroes. Soldier statues were, Brown observes, “avatars of whiteness” (p. 120). As Brown exhibits in his final chapter, Civil War commemoration deeply informed how Americans commemorated World War I, such that many, if not most...

审核人：

• 内战纪念碑和托马斯·J·布朗的美国军事化
• 乔伊·吉格（Joy M.

数以千计的纪念碑和其他建筑结构都体现了军事上的英勇，英雄主义，自我牺牲和美德，可追溯到独立战争以来的所有军事冲突中，构成了美国纪念地的景观。对于大多数观察者而言，这些纪念碑反映了民族文化，纪念碑中体现的军事价值观是向那些为自己的祖国和祖国而战的人们所崇尚的军事价值观。就大多数美国人而言，对军队的热爱，对军队领导者的尊敬以及对国旗的象征，以及热情地用花岗岩和青铜色来宣扬这些情感，都注入了民族身份。实际上，纪念碑确实通过其肖像和铭文传达了这些信息，但它们未能有效传达的是其制作的历史背景。

在《内战纪念碑与美国军事化》中，托马斯·J·布朗认为，尽管纪念地景观另有说明，但美国是在对纪念碑的传统抵触和不信任以及对军方普遍不屑一顾的时代锻造的。直到南北战争之后，美国人才拥护一个军事化国家的象征主义。早期的圣像破坏起源于美国独立战争本身，当时，在独立宣言宣告成立后，殖民者拆除了乔治三世国王的雕像，其中许多雕像是骑马雕像。对于公民[结束第131页]在共和国成立之初，这种具有代表性的纪念碑散布着君主制和帝国主义的烙印，而且对于许多人来说，书面文字比任何雕像都具有更大的纪念意义。使民族身份军事化的过程既不是立竿见影的，也不是没有它的不利因素，但是到20世纪初，南北战争纪念碑已成为解释战争和象征现代民族价值观的中心。

向美国武术文化的转变涉及内战期间公众对士兵和指挥官的牺牲的看法的演变。最早的纪念碑反映了战前对大型代表军事纪念碑的不信任，本质上是fun葬的-他们首先是退伍军人，然后是社区的努力，以应对内战造成的巨大生命损失。但是，到1870年代，公众对战争死亡的兴趣减少了，正如布朗在其介绍中所指出的那样，“纪念碑的第二次扩散假定了另一种形式”（第2页）。较早的纪念碑专门纪念战争的死者，而现在的纪念碑既纪念了活着的阵亡者，也纪念了死去的战士，他们将退伍军人“看作是强大，纪律严明的公民的典范”（第2页）。除了士兵雕像以外，寓言人物的广泛使用进一步使纪念碑充满视觉上的修辞，即只有通过战争才能实现和平。到19世纪末，指挥官的纪念碑（具有讽刺意味的是，其中许多都是马术的）被用来宣扬等级领导的价值和在西班牙-美国战争和第一次世界大战期间战斗的年轻人之间形成的代代相传的崇高精神。内战一代的灰色（或已故）英雄。

使美国在军事纪念历史上与众不同的一种现象是，内战后的几十年中，联盟和前联邦制–胜利者和被征服者都竖起了无数的纪念碑。最终的结果是双重的：第一，无论战斗动机如何，双方士兵表现出的英勇精神和英勇精神同样有效。其次，种族中心主义和白人至上主义为民族英雄的描写提供了信息。布朗观察到，士兵雕像是“白色化身”（第120页）。正如布朗在其最后一章中所展示的，内战纪念深刻地传达了美国人如何纪念第一次世界大战，因此，即使不是大多数，美国人也是如此。