Tracing how the Civil War continues to shape the landscapes, politics, and culture of today

Every year, thousands of Americans don Civil War uniforms and restage the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil. In Gettysburg, Time and Again, Mads Daugbjerg explores how the Civil War continues to inhabit the present. Bringing together reenactors, National Park Service rangers, ghost hunters, tourists, and local residents, this study examines how Americans across social and political divides engage the past through the landscapes, institutions, and everyday practices of public history.

At once historically grounded and urgently contemporary, this book speaks directly to current struggles over the meaning of America and its values. Rather than treating time and history as abstract concepts, Daugbjerg approaches them as lived, material forces produced through commemorative landscapes, interpretive labor, and the relentless restaging of 1863 for contemporary audiences. Studying reenactment illuminates not only a distinctive cultural practice but also the broader processes through which the past is continuously reshaped, repeated, and felt in the present. He argues that present-day American unrest can be understood, in part, as a conflict over how the past is curated. He further suggests that Americans today often occupy profoundly different temporal worlds.

Daugbjerg traces these tensions through landscapes, material culture, tourism infrastructures, and social life at Gettysburg. Challenging the commonsense notion of history as linear progression, Gettysburg, Time and Again reveals repetition as a defining feature of American historical experience. By offering a finely grained anthropology of the “present past,” Daugbjerg shows how history’s afterlives remain powerfully out of sync and why those temporal disjunctions matter now.

MADS DAUGBJERG is associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University.