Megan Kate Nelson's RUIN NATION is the first book to bring together
environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of
ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of
change. During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers'
bodies were transformed into "dead heaps of ruins," novel sights in the
southern landscape. RUIN NATION examines the narratives and images that
Americans produced as they confronted the war's destructiveness. This is the second book in the UnCivil Wars series.
UNCIVIL WARS is a series dedicated to new ways of seeing and telling the
American Civil War. Authors in the series are encouraged to focus on
unconventional social types and to think deeply about narrative
strategy, telling their stories through memory, reverse chronology,
snapshots and glimpses, multiple perspectives, or microhistory.
In the video below, Megan Kate Nelson gives a sneak-peek of her book. The video contains brief summaries of each of the chapters and features excerpts from historical documents. RUIN NATION will be available in May.
