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PROGRAM | History

The Incommunicable Experience of War, 1775-1918

By: Tyler Putman Chair: David Suisman

ABSTRACT

This dissertation asks how and why Americans came to believe that the experience of wartime combat is impossible to imagine, so that only combat veterans can understand “what it is like.” How did this become the primary way Americans think about combat today? For early Americans, combat was as communicable and imaginable as many other life experiences. Three factors helped dismantle this conception over the course of the long nineteenth century, so that Americans such as Civil War veteran and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., eventually spoke of “the incommunicable experience of war.” First, the material culture, technology, and physical environments of war gradually diverged from those of everyday life, so that uniforms, weapons, military tactics, and battlefield landscapes seemed stranger. Second, shifts in the nature and visibility of American violence – mortality and rituals of death, animal slaughter and abuse, public physical punishments, and the proximity of warfare itself – meant that new soldiers were less prepared to understand violent combat and civilians were less prepared to imagine it. Finally, burgeoning print culture and new ideas about explaining personal experience in print changed how people communicated. Despite the rise of war memoirs and fiction, by the late nineteenth century Americans had concluded that no amount of reading was enough to understand combat.

This dissertation traces these changes through four chronological chapters that consider how soldiers communicated wartime experiences during and after the wars themselves. At its core, it examines how people translate and record embodied experience into words and images and how they feel about the limits of their translations. The first chapter, on the Revolutionary War, describes the metaphors early Americans used to understand war and why they found personal suffering and sublime sights – not combat – difficult to describe. The second, on the Civil War, looks at how material culture, societal ideas, and literary depictions made not only this new war but combat in general hard to imagine. The third, on World War One, discusses how radically different battlefields and emerging ideas about psychology and trauma made communicating combat not only materially confounding but also emotionally and empathetically difficult. The final chapter, on contemporary war reenacting, provides a case study of the lived experience of incommunicability by examining reenactors who seek to recreate the material and emotional realities of past wars. It examines the transhistorical nature of the conception of incommunicable combat, showing how contemporary ideas about specific experiences pervade even a hobby dedicated to recreating them. This dissertation contributes to histories of emotions, senses, and ideas, military and social history, and contemporary discussions about combat trauma and veteran reintegration by investigating the alternative ways Americans in the past experienced and understood war.

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