The University of North Carolina Press has produced an impressive historiography through its Civil War America series, yet few books focus so directly on people’s material experiences of waging war on and off the battlefield. For that reason, A Nation Unraveled by Sarah Jones Weicksel stands out. Rather than concentrating on notable battles or well-known military figures, Weicksel turns to clothing and textiles to show how men and women outside the political and military elite experienced and shaped the trajectory of the war through their sartorial choices. Even in the absence of the bodies that once wore them, the garments at the center of her study—which she “reads” alongside printed sources—reveal how clothing shaped political identities, gender roles, and the contours of freedom and citizenship during and after the conflict.

As a former student of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture Studies, Weicksel brings an objects-based approach to her analysis, pairing surviving garments with cabinet cards, letters, journals, advertisements, and other ephemera to reconstruct the meanings historical actors embedded in clothing. Rather than presenting a strictly chronological narrative, Weicksel organizes the book around the lifecycle of garments as they pass through many hands, dividing her study into four stages: making, wearing, destroying, and saving. This structure challenges our tendency to frame Civil War culture through binaries such as North and South or battlefield and home front. Instead, she shows how experiences with clothing often transcended these boundaries, particularly in patterns of production and consumption. As she notes in the introduction, readers encounter garments and their owners at a particular moment in her analysis, though they remain part of a much longer, storied lifecycle.

Business historians will gain much from Weicksel’s work, particularly in the first two sections devoted to “Making” and “Wearing.” In Chapters 1 and 2, she examines labor and the industrial supply chains that formed textile and garment production on both sides of the conflict, while Chapters 3 and 4 examine trade policies that created new consumer markets for patriotic clothes and accessories. Her most important contribution, however, is her attention to gender as an overlooked dimension of waging war that shaped how clothing was produced and worn. Weicksel complicates familiar narratives about the standardization of military uniforms by showing how soldiers—particularly wealthy and well-connected ones—exercised agency over parts of their uniforms. She coins the term “brass manhood” (p. 20) to describe a broader cultural practice of masculinity, as soldiers adopted different brass buttons with intricate stamped patterns to signal rank, social status, and regional affiliations. This extended to new consumer products like body armor. Black soldiers also participated in brass manhood, donning Union blue uniforms and brass buttons stamped with eagles as a claim to freedom and citizenship. Weicksel also shows that discrepancies between uniforms stemmed from the fluid movement of textile and garment production between military and domestic spheres. As Union and Confederate armies struggled to clothe their soldiers, private tailors, seamstresses, and family members helped fill the gap throughout the war with custom shirts and pants.

She also expands our understanding of women’s technical labor as fundamental to waging war, upending familiar stories about quaint sewing circles of elite women on either side of the conflict. When Sherman raided the Roswell Manufacturing Company in Georgia, he arrested roughly 400 women and child textile workers and charged them with treason, revealing how the US government increasingly recognized women as military actors. One of the more novel examples of women’s wartime labor appears in scraps of fabric with needles and thread attached that soldiers referred to as a “housewife or hussif” (p. 40). These sewing kits, sent by wives, mothers, and sisters, allowed soldiers to repair uniforms in the field and illustrate how domestic labor was embedded in the work of waging war. Weicksel’s also incorporates the labor of enslaved women, who are often treated as loose threads on the selvage of a broader cultural tapestry. She highlights their work as compelled laborers, forced to sew, weave, and launder uniforms for the Confederacy, even as Southern women took credit for their work. Enslaved women also exercised agency by withholding their technical skills in protest as one letter describes. Though few women left written documents behind, their technical skills survive in the hand-sewn garments and woven fragments that remain.

In the third section, “Destroying,” Weicksel traces the history of looting during the Civil War. She adds an important dimension to our understanding of looting as an extension of bodily violence, showing how US and Confederate soldiers “peeled” outer garments, buttons, and personal effects such as tintypes from the bodies of fallen soldiers, stripping them of their coveted brass manhood. Sometimes bits of uniforms served as war trophies; in other cases, soldiers simply sought better-fitting shirts or trousers to compensate for disruptions in uniform supply chains. Looting also affected the psyches of soldiers and their families, which leads to the final section, “Saving,” where Weicksel examines how clothing continued to carry the memory of the conflict, as garments that survived became powerful tools in shaping how the war was remembered. Given the strength of Weicksel’s analysis elsewhere, this section feels less developed, yet it still captures the multiple meanings people ascribed to garments in the years following the war. Readers may wish for a fuller discussion of how garments shaped postwar memory in the North, as Weicksel’s analysis focuses more heavily on the South, likely reflecting the uneven survival of artifacts in museum and archival collections.

Nevertheless, Weicksel’s study is one of the first to focus exclusively on fashion and textile production during the Civil War as sites of broader cultural production. As such, it represents an important contribution to Civil War historiography and a compelling example of how methods from material culture studies can be applied to business or labor histories. Students will also find A Nation Unraveled a useful template for constructing narratives that rely less on strict chronology and more on the movement and meaning of objects and people.