In Memory of the American Soldiers and Sailors 1861-1865 meraki_canvas as the Biggest Little City

as the Biggest Little City in the World

his likeness reissued for a generation that needed Washington's stoic countenance to anchor the noisier politics of Polk's America

The document reads less like law than like a sentence pronounced over four million lives

rendered in the documentary hand of an era still cataloguing what it had already overrun

its allegorical title insisting on a principle that Reconstruction was already conceding in practice

In Memory of the American Soldiers and Sailors 1861-1865 meraki_canvas as the Biggest Little CityIn Memory of the American Soldiers and Sailors 1861 1865 belongs to the long arithmetic of mourning that followed Appomattox a commemorative print enrolling Union dead in the careful, civic grammar of a republic still counting its losses and learning what remembrance was supposed to look like. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical