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Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs (review)

comes to the fore. For example, after describing the types of destruction military engagements of all sizes had on wooded areas, Nelson writes, “All of these actions took a toll on the surrounding trees, creating ghost forests: large acreages of trees stripped of branches and leaves and so whittled by bullets and cannonballs that they resembled corseted southern ladies” (144). Nelson suggests that such “ghost forests” became “unusable places, ‘abandoned wastes’ that shocked the senses because they were but a vestige of what they used to be. They were nature’s ruins” (151). This chapter asks readers to look beyond the war’s obvious human costs to recognize that physical and ecological damage can have long-lasting repercussions as well. It is in Nelson’s conclusion, however, where the real power of the book can be found. Here, she reminds us that Civil War ruins continue to shape American lives and identities, and not always in constructive ways. Nelson states that in their eff orts to either obliterate or preserve the war’s ruins, “Americans have repurposed them” and have rendered them nostalgic rather than instructive (238). She suggests, “The erasure of these ruins has quelled conversation, and we have lapsed into a kind of hushed reverence in the war’s historic places. Such is the true cost of the fi nal transformation of Civil War ruins from a persistent material reality to an echo that is barely heard. The real history of the Civil War is dark and twisty. Without its ruins, we cannot fully understand the terrifying nature of wartime violence and the complex and contradictory nation that it created” (239). Nelson’s book is a compelling reminder of that “dark and twisty” past and should be read not just by academic historians, but by museum professionals and others engaged in historic preservation and public history generally. Her story is not just about the Civil War but about why that war continues to resonate and why we must continue to study and try to understand it. Lisa M. Brady