It feels odd to say that I enjoyed the Nelson reading, since her vivid descriptions and imagery of the havoc wreaked by both sides of the American Civil War were often quite disturbing. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I am thankful<\/em> for the reading, since it opened my eyes to a darker and more harrowing side of a war that was already painted pretty bleak in my mind.<\/p>\n

Nelson writes that many Americans struggled to comprehend the destruction left behind by Union and Confederate soldiers because they \u201cbelieved that such ruins belonged to Europe of the past, to the \u2018ancients’\u201d (22). Reading this chapter, I actually found myself in something of an opposite position, in that I so directly associate images of ruin with my own<\/em> era (terrorist attacks, natural disasters, nuclear explosions) that it was jarring to be reminded that mass destruction is by no means a 21st-century invention. Of course, I learned in high school and middle school about the Battle of Antietam (bloodiest in the war) and Sherman’s March to the Sea, but my ability to conceptualize these centuries-old events is pretty pitiful compared to the images seared in my mind of more recent catastrophes, like photographs of post-Katrina New Orleans or video clips of 9\/11. In other words, my own understanding of and the gravitas <\/em>I assign to distant historical tragedies is distorted and diluted by the presentness of more recent events.<\/p>\n