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In the Shadow of "Helmira": Elmira R...

Emerson, Gary M.

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In the Shadow of "Helmira": Elmira Remembers Its Civil War Prison Camp.

紀錄類型:	書目-電子資源 : Monograph/item
正題名/作者:	In the Shadow of "Helmira": Elmira Remembers Its Civil War Prison Camp./
作者:	Emerson, Gary M.
出版者:	Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, : 2024,
面頁冊數:	163 p.
附註:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-12, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International85-12A.
標題:	American history. -
電子資源:	https://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=31239696
ISBN:	9798383168936

In the Shadow of "Helmira": Elmira Remembers Its Civil War Prison Camp.
Emerson, Gary M.

In the Shadow of "Helmira": Elmira Remembers Its Civil War Prison Camp. - Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2024 - 163 p.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-12, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, 2024.

It has been said that wars are fought twice, first on the battlefield and afterwards in the realm of memory. The Civil War prison camp at Elmira, New York became caught up in the battles over memory in the years after the war. Two competing memories of the prison camp emerged after the Civil War. Southerners chose to remember Elmira as "Helmira," a place they claimed was just as bad as, and perhaps worse, than Andersonville. Elmirans chose to remember the prison as an exemplar of care, a place where the best Christian humanity was shown to Confederate prisoners. This dissertation examines how the memory of "Helmira" gradually emerged as the dominant memory of the prison camp. It also argues that neither the memory of the Elmira Prison Camp as a place of Christian humanity, nor "Helmira," is an accurate one.Memory shapes our identity. Both sides combined myth and fact to support a memory of Elmira promoting their own agenda. Elmirans wanted to be remembered for practicing Christian virtues of kindness, sympathy, and forgiveness towards the enemy soldiers in their midst. They eschewed any blame for the high death rate that prevailed at the Elmira Prison Camp, while blaming the Confederacy for the atrocious conditions in Southern prison camps. Elmirans, like most Northerners, accepted the idea of the Union Cause. They took the moral high ground by espousing a divine cause to save the Union and end slavery. Former Confederates promoted the memory of "Helmira" to deflect the shame of Andersonville, and other notorious Confederate prison camps, and to blame the North for the rise of the deadly conditions prevalent in Civil War prisons. United behind the ideology of the Lost Cause, Southerners used Elmira as proof of Northern atrocity.Although Elmirans pushed back against the image of "Helmira," it became the memory that won out, with even many Elmirans accepting it today. That remembrance won out because memory often is as much about the present as it is about the past. What gets remembered, as well as what is forgotten, is shaped by the present. As the North and South moved toward reconciliation over the course of the 20th Century, the idea that the Elmira Prison Camp could have been less than "Christian-like" became more acceptable. Modern warfare also reaffirmed the brutality of war, including maltreatment of prisoners of war.By accepting memory as a construction, historians can look backward and consider how the memory of Elmira was made in order to grasp a better understanding of how and why it was formed in different ways at different times. Every prison camp was different. Each had their contingencies to explain what made them deadly places. By shedding the constructed memories about them, perhaps we can better understand what earned Elmira and other Civil War prisons such deadly reputations.

ISBN: 9798383168936Subjects--Topical Terms:

2122692
American history.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Civil War prison camp

In the Shadow of "Helmira": Elmira Remembers Its Civil War Prison Camp.
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