Suffering and Solace: Photography and Trauma in a Changing Nation

Abstract

Death, grief, and mourning changed more rapidly and radically in America between the Civil War and Vietnam than ever before. America itself changed drastically over this period, becoming a diverse, urban, industrial society. Urbanization took the disposal of the dead out of the hands of community women, and the mass deaths of the Civil War aided the growth of the professional death care industry. Different ethnic groups and faiths brought new traditions to mourning. Urbanism and westward expansion changed the structure of family networks, while science changed the way remains were handled, leading to shifts in ritual.

The advent of hospitals, modern medicine, and embalming facilitated a removal of death from the home, family, and community and transformed it into an exclusive and pseudoscientific business, denaturalizing death and grief both. However, the technological advancements in process photography both facilitated and recorded these changes. Images of battlefields strewn with bloated corpses and those of domestic lynching shocked a culture that believed in 'good death,' but only temporarily. Postmortem photography meant that the dead could be kept as both memento and memento mori, as would casket images somewhat later. Then they too lost impact and importance.

With each subsequent generation, death would be further removed from life, grief and mourning would be denormalized, excised from American life, practices and images fading away.

Disciplines

American Studies | Psychiatric and Mental Health

Subject Area

American studies; American history; Mental health

Department

Humanities (HUM)

First Advisor

Shaw, Jeffery

Second Advisor

Neary, Timothy

Third Advisor

Gray, Chris

Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

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