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Illustrating the complex interplay between nature and humankind, environmental historians have contributed to scholarly reassessments of the causes, course, and consequences of America’s Civil War. 1 In “Nature as Material Culture: Antietam National Battlefield,” Lisa Brady and Timothy Silver continue this trend, employing environmental history methodology to examine a popular form of material culture: preserved battlefields. By employing a broad source-base, incorporating New Materialist language challenging notions of environmental “agency,” and demonstrating how nature and culture together create a “hybrid” landscape, Brady and Silver exemplify environmental history’s interdisciplinary dynamism. 2 Visiting Antietam alongside other environmental historians to “sort through the layers that nature and culture contributed to the events on 17 September 1862,” Brady and Silver find a curious blend of the old and new, the cultural and natural. In three sections – The Place, The Battle, The Park – the authors survey Antietam’s geologic and agricultural history, the topography that shaped combat, and the current policy of landscape rehabilitation restoring woodlots, fence lines, orchards, and other 1862 features to give tourists an “authentic” visit experience. They discover an “artifact writ large,” reflecting not only the cultural and natural forces that helped form the built environment but also a modern interpretative framework that, in their view, overlooks the “less savory aspects of the complex relationship between people, nature, and war.” Among the strongest and well-developed of Brady and Silver’s points is their contention that the restored landscape at Antietam does not – and cannot – “recover the [environmental] experience of that day.” Silver’s contribution is evident when the authors detail biotic realities of soldiering. Here they continue Silver’s earlier explorations of the Civil War as an “ecological event,” sourcing from natural and health sciences to illustrate how a type of biological exchange occurred literally on the ground between soil, plants, animals, water and soldiers in their efforts to find sustenance and avoid “at least 575 tons of solid waste and 65,000 gallons of liquid effluent on the landscape around [Antietam] every day.
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Get Help Now!Brady and Silver locate this exchange between organisms at the center of Antietam’s story; for them, malnutrition-induced diarrhea and contaminated water is as much the story as the battle. In fronting environmental realities, Brady and Silver reinforce environmental history’s importance to Civil War scholarship’s “darker” turn, where a romanticized war has given way to an “unlovely mess.”4 Of significance is Brady and Silver’s departure from the terms “agent” or “agency,” descriptors now largely deemed counterproductive in distinguishing natural from human activity.5 The authors instead declare that nature is “an active force” that “moves to its own particular rhythms.” This reflects the growing influence of New Materialist theory in studies of Civil War material culture. Brady and Silver are among the first Civil War scholars to shift terminology to better reflect the essence of “actants” and “energies” that impact human activity.6 Landscape restoration is indicative of the cultural impulse to use history to find meaning in the present. 7 Brady and Silver recognize that nature and material culture intertwine at Antietam through a profound sense of place that connects twenty-first-century visitors to the nineteenth-century past. For Brady and Silver, the restored site “is as much a memorial to the present as it is to the past,” reflecting tourist need for understanding and inspiration. By not engaging with the robust scholarship on Civil War cultural landscape management, however, the authors miss an opportunity to deepen their analysis. Other battlefields – including Manassas, Cedar Creek, Monocacy, and Stones River – employ landscape strategies that give equal weight to pre- and post-battle site history, including those of slavery, emancipation, segregation, and native peoples. These “layered landscapes” eschew a static nature and embrace a historical continuum. 8 Given Brady and Silver’s desire to “sort through layers [of] nature and culture,” this omission is regrettable. Still, Brady and Silver are correct that Antietam is today – as in 1862 – a hybrid landscape, emblematic of interconnected natural forces and the cultural priorities of human occupants. By examining Antietam as such, they contribute to the ascendance of hybridity within environmental history and convincingly connect the subfield with material culture studies.
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