Join us for Derek Maxfield’s talk on Victorian America, Civil War disruption, and how it reshaped 19th-century views of death.

By 1860, Victorians had come to dominate the American cultural landscape. The working class sought for most of the century to emulate them, while the wealthy used their advantages to set themselves apart with material goods and selectively followed Victorian rules to appear sophisticated. However, Victorian cultural dominance was severely challenged by the Civil War. The harsh realities of war changed Victorian values and left many searching for ways to cope. In few areas was this more apparent than in attitudes toward death. Victorians who entered the 1860s romanticizing death found themselves appalled by grim depictions of mangled corpses in photographs of the era. Looking for a new direction, they readily embraced the Industrial and Consumer Revolutions in the decades after the war to reshape how death and dying were observed, how corpses were cared for, and how cemetery art memorialized the dead.

Derek Maxfield, formerly an associate professor of history at Genesee Community College, received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019) and for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities (2013). His research focuses on Victorian deathways and 19th century politics and culture. He has written for Emerging Civil War since 2015 and is the author of Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp – Elmira, NY (2020) and Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War (2023), both published by Savas Beatie.