Playing at War (eBook)

Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games

Patrick A. Lewis, James Hill Welborn (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
356 Seiten
LSU Press (Verlag)
978-0-8071-8346-5 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Autor

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.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.9.2024
• Reihe/Serie: American Wars and Popular Culture
• Co-Autor: Daniel Farrell, James Frusetta, Blake Hill, Jonathan S. Jones, John R. Legg, Holly Pinheiro, Jacopo della Quercia, Nick Sacco, David Silkenat, Kathleen Logothetis Thompson, Charles R. Welsko, Katherine L. Brackett, Stephen Edwards, Aaron M. Phillips, Erzsebet Fazekas, Christian McWhirter
• Mitarbeit: Herausgeber (Serie): Matthew Christopher Hulbert, Matthew E. Stanley
• Verlagsort: Baton Rouge
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Spielen / Lernen ► Abenteuer / Spielgeschichten
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Weitere Themen ► Computerspiele
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood • Design • historical settings • Mass Culture • Memory Studies • national identity • North & South • Oregon Trail • popular consciousness • Red Dead Redemption • Research methods • Steam • Strategy • Videogaming • white supremacy
• ISBN-10: 0-8071-8346-6 / 0807183466
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-8346-5 / 9780807183465