ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository

Title

"Goodbye, Old Arm": The Domestication of Veterans' Disabilities in Civil War Era Popular Songs

Authors

Devin Burke, University of LouisvilleFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2015

Department

Music History

Abstract

IN October of 1863, two years into the Civil War, a short editorial titled "Empty Sleeves" appeared on the front page of the Staunton Spectator.1 It addressed a question that had become familiar in the wake of the war's unprecedented violence; namely, how to encounter, or how to look at (in both the literal and figurative senses), the quickly growing population of veterans whose injuries marked them as "disabled:' This question could be cause for considerable anxiety in able-bodied Americans whose beliefs were shaped by Victorian and muscular Christian values.

Comments

“Goodbye, Old Arm”: The Domestication of Veterans’ Disabilities in Civil War-Era Popular Songs.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, edited by Joseph Straus, Neil Lerner, Blake Howe, and Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, 423-446. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Companion web materials: https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780199331444/ch22/

ThinkIR Citation

Burke, Devin, ""Goodbye, Old Arm": The Domestication of Veterans' Disabilities in Civil War Era Popular Songs" (2015). Faculty Scholarship. 539.
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty/539

ORCID

0000-0002-3657-3842