Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games(American Wars and Popular Culture)

Playing at War offers an innovative focus on Civil War video games as significant sites of memory creation, distortion, and evolution in popular culture. With fifteen essays by historians, the collection analyzes the emergence and popularity of video games that topically engage the period surrounding the American Civil War, from the earliest console games developed in the 1980s through the web-based games of the twenty-first century, including popular titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and War of Rights. Alongside discussions of technological capabilities and advances, as well as their impact on gameplay and content, the essays consider how these games engage with historical scholarship on the Civil War era, the degree to which video games reflect and contribute to popular understandings of the period, and how those dynamics reveal shifting conceptions of martial identity and historical memory within U.S. popular culture. Video games offer productive sites for extending the analysis of Civil War memory into the post Confederates in the Attic era, including the political and cultural moments of Obama and Trump, where overt expressions of Lost Cause memory were challenged and removed from schools and public spaces, then embraced by new manifestations of white supremacist organizations.

Edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III, Playing at War traces the drift of Civil War memory into digital spaces and gaming cultures, encouraging historians to engage more extensively with video games as important cultural media for examining how contemporary Americans interact with the nation's past.

About the Author :
Patrick A. Lewis is the director of collections and research at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, and the author of For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War.

James Hill Welborn III, associate professor of history at Georgia College and State University, is the author of Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies: Southern Violence and White Supremacy in the Civil War Era.

Review :
"Edited by Patrick A Lewis and James Hill Welborn III, Playing at War explores how identity and memory are represented in Civil War video games, each chapter exploring similar themes as related to specific video games. . . . all offer compelling essays, each an analysis of various video games and their relative academic value when we consider topics such as authenticity, representation, and popular culture."--Journal of Popular Culture "Playing at War would be a worthy addition on the shelf of any nineteenth-century American historian, especially those with a focus on the Civil War and memory studies. With these essays' approachable writing style, the volume is also highly accessible for the general reading public, and there is substantial pedagogical utility for educators who wish to utilize Civil War video games in the classroom as primary source documents, as several of the book's essays suggest."--Journal of Southern History "Historians of the Civil War have long studied the memory of that conflict via novels, films, and television. This punchy and enlightening essay collection is a powerful argument that video games deserve a place within that pop culture pantheon. Analyzing games both popular and obscure, the essays within map out a largely uncharted terrain, and the result is both eye-opening and entertaining."--Tore C. Olsson, author of Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past "This is the first book to examine Civil War video games. Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III have brought together an all-star lineup of scholars. This isn't just a book for the scholars that love games (although they will love it). . . . Non-gamers will find it worthwhile as well. Playing at War is full of innovative and original scholarship on Civil War memory, popular culture, and how we learn about the past through sources other than books. Providing a multitude of methodologies for how to approach video games, this volume isn't playing around."--Adam H. Domby, author of The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory