![]() ![]() While Lepore argues that war produces discourse and constructs meaning, in the Civil War, the contest for meaning came before the blood. The Civil War also offers a constructive challenge to Lepore’s insights on the relationship between language, meaning, and pain. Looking behind wounds at the words that made them manifest, Lepore takes an historiographic turn that Daniel Wickberg has advocated and described as a shift “from immediate experience to mediated forms of representation.” 1 Historians of the Civil War, a field long dominated by military and, more recently, social history, could benefit from Lepore’s analysis of language and her focus on meaning-making in war. In The Name of War (1998), a creative study of the rhetoric and representation surrounding King Philip’s War, Jill Lepore analyzes war as a contest for meaning, a struggle where words matter as much as wounds. ![]() found scrawled on the wall of a Nazi railway-car ( Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of weekly guest posts that Rivka Maizlish is doing for us. ![]()
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