Landscapes of Memory

The United States was the first modern nation to establish national war cemeteries, in the wake of the Civil War. The national cemeteries at Gettysburg and Antietam preceded by almost a decade those established in Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the nineteenth-century American military cemeteries bear striking visual similarities with those of the First World War in Europe, suggesting that many of those features that historians have identified as specific to that conflict had an early incarnation on the other side of the Atlantic. With these cemeteries the United States created a distinction between combatant and non-combatant within the burial sites, and it positioned them, wherever possible, on or close to the actual battlefields on which that war was fought. The relative lack of attention accorded America’s Civil War in general studies of nineteenth-century warfare has meant that the development of the link between the nation state and the individual who fought in its name – a recognized development in the context of many European wars – has not been fully explored in the American case.