Screwed off way to much today.  Read this this evening:

Fahs, Alice. "The Market Value of Memory: Popular War Histories and
the Northern Literary Marketplace, 1861-1868." Book History 1, no. 1
(1998): 107-39.

Discusses how popular war histories, written during the war and sold by subscription, came to be the dominate histories of the Civil War for years after.

Yet during the war itself the popular histories had often created a hybrid mix of ideology and entertainment. Finally, the popular war histories should serve to remind us that, on the one hand, commerical drives do not necessarily strip political meanings from print culture in mid-nineteenth-century America. On the other hand, however, they should also remind us that commercial transactions played a vital role in the construction of national memory—and that within a culture of print capitalism, public forms of memory are never entirely separate from market drives (133).

I’m liking Fahs work (see "The Feminized Civil War" from yesterday).  I like her conclusions and they are so very relevant to today.  I’ll have to try and track down more of her work for my personal edification; after my paper is written. 

Recommended.