Exploring how the face and body of America were imagined both physically and metaphorically during the Civil War, this book shows how visual iconography affected changes in postbellum gendered and racialised identifications of the nation.

"A study of Civil War iconography is long overdue.... Samuels offers a fertile reading of that symbol system and its slippages. Examining texts of all types--novels, statues, and images--she lays bare the preoccupying anxieties.... Samuels has an intriguing mind, and it is a pleasure to watch it work. Text after text, subhead after subhead, she offers compelling readings and telling juxtapositions of familiar and unfamiliar documents."--American Historical Review "Advanced students of nineteenth-century cultural studies may find in Facing America some challenging interpretations and tantalizing suggestions."--Arkansas Historical Quarterly "[A] learned and intriguing study."--Virginia Quarterly Review "This is groundbreaking work."--Choice "Tracing the iconography of familial and political violence from the age of discovery and colonial rule through its manifestation in fiction, broadsides, and photography of the antislavery movement and the Civil War, Facing America presents a fascinating and highly original reinterpretation of the rhetorical war over slavery and the real war that slavery produced." --Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles "Coalescing theoretical, historical, visual, literary, and personal perspectives, Samuels provides a variety of lenses through which to examine powerful tools of expression in nineteenth-century America. From novels, poems, photographs, political cartons, statues, memorials, and commemorations, she extracts and explicates an emerging national iconography that reveals the desires, fears, eroticism, sexuality, racism, and violence that mobilized the forces of society and that makes 'facing' American compelling and disturbing. This is an original and exciting contribution to American cultural studies." --Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside "This provocative and sophisticated book articulates the unstable intersections among race, gender, and nationalism in nineteenth-century America. Ranging among a great many texts and genres, from photographs, caricatures, pictures, and statues to novels, stories, and poems, Samuels offers surprising new perspectives on identity crossovers, violence in domestic fiction, photographs of Civil War corpses, and the strange career of Lincoln's body, as well as on many familiar and unfamiliar writers from Caroline Kirkland to Ambrose Bierce. Her meditation on what she calls 'substitution panic' shows how visual or verbal displacements paradoxically enhance anxieties about race and sexuality, and sometimes invite viewers or readers to become 'pornogothic voyeurs.' Even American coins, she points out, have us 'facing the dead.'" --David Leverenz, University of Florida "A study of Civil War iconography is long overdue.... Samuels offers a fertile reading of that symbol system and its slippages. Examining texts of all types--novels, statues, and images--she lays bare the preoccupying anxieties.... Samuels has an intriguing mind, and it is a pleasure to watch it work. Text after text, subhead after subhead, she offers compelling readings and telling juxtapositions of familiar and unfamiliar documents."--American Historical Review "Advanced students of nineteenth-century cultural studies may find in Facing America some challenging interpretations and tantalizing suggestions."--Arkansas Historical Quarterly "[A] learned and intriguing study."--Virginia Quarterly Review "This is groundbreaking work."--Choice "Tracing the iconography of familial and political violence from the age of discovery and colonial rule through its manifestation in fiction, broadsides, and photography of the antislavery movement and the Civil War, Facing America presents a fascinating and highly original reinterpretation of the rhetorical war over slavery and the real war that slavery produced." --Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles "Coalescing theoretical, historical, visual, literary, and personal perspectives, Samuels provides a variety of lenses through which to examine powerful tools of expression in nineteenth-century America. From novels, poems, photographs, political cartons, statues, memorials, and commemorations, she extracts and explicates an emerging national iconography that reveals the desires, fears, eroticism, sexuality, racism, and violence that mobilized the forces of society and that makes 'facing' American compelling and disturbing. This is an original and exciting contribution to American cultural studies." --Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside "This provocative and sophisticated book articulates the unstable intersections among race, gender, and nationalism in nineteenth-century America. Ranging among a great many texts and genres, from photographs, caricatures, pictures, and statues to novels, stories, and poems, Samuels offers surprising new perspectives on identity crossovers, violence in domestic fiction, photographs of Civil War corpses, and the strange career of Lincoln's body, as well as on many familiar and unfamiliar writers from Caroline Kirkland to Ambrose Bierce. Her meditation on what she calls 'substitution panic' shows how visual or verbal displacements paradoxically enhance anxieties about race and sexuality, and sometimes invite viewers or readers to become 'pornogothic voyeurs.' Even American coins, she points out, have us 'facing the dead.'"--David Leverenz, University of Florida