Mary Kate Robbett

My dissertation explores the ways Americans collected, marketed, and displayed physical mementos of the Civil War between 1861 and 1915. Drawing on archival and object research, it examines the ways people used artifacts to shape private and public memory both during and after the war. My project reveals how an unprecedented supply of and demand for war relics led Americans to grapple with complex dynamics of value – historical, emotional, and commercial – and competing claims to historical authority, authenticity, and ownership. I argue that Civil War Americans’ relic practices are important because they both reflected and informed broader trends in this period, including the expansion of consumer culture, the evolution of U.S. history museums, and postwar concepts of national identity.

The war’s diffusion of collecting and surfeit of relics facilitated the creation of dozens of Civil War museums from the 1860s to 1910s. Their varied founders and curators – including veterans, entrepreneurs, government officials, women’s memorial societies, and newly minted professional museologists – all drew on the era’s widely held belief that relics’ materiality made them uniquely potent tools to convey emotional and factual truths. However, these groups’ differing approaches to collection, display, and commerce revealed conflicts over not only the war’s meaning, but also how history museums ought to function. These spaces were many of the first U.S. museums dedicated exclusively to historical artifacts, and both their collections and the philosophies that shaped them continue to influence American public history.