Winning Our Wonder: Rhetorical Re/Constructions of American Civil War Women on the Web

How public memory informs our understanding of gender and race in the Civil War Era and beyond

Who is remembered? Who forgotten? What version of the story is told, repeated, memorialized? Patty Wilde draws on the methods of rhetorical circulation studies to trace how the Civil War stories of influential female figures have evolved in print and online. She charts how depictions of gender and race have been obscured, augmented, and amplified in popular digital resources including websites maintained by the American Battlefield Trust and National Park Service, Esri StoryMaps hosted by the Library of Congress, and Wikipedia.

The accounts of Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Belle Boyd, Harriet Tubman, Sarah Emma Edmonds, Loreta Janeta Velazquez, and Susie King Taylor detailed in Winning Our Wonder not only serve as wellsprings of memory, but act as blueprints for tracing how these women’s stories have changed over time and across media. Wilde argues that these visions of the past inform popular memory of the Civil War, an event that continues to haunt contemporary politics, culture, and life, shaping perceptions of citizenship and belonging.

Patty Wilde is associate professor of English and director of composition at Washington State University, Tri-Cities. She has published articles in journals including Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and Peitho.