Greatest Hit of the Season: The Geary Thespian Corps and the Union’s Culture Industry during the Civil War

Abstract: This essay examines the visual and performative cultures of soldiers in the 28th Pennsylvania Infantry and the portrayals of soldiers circulating in the Union’s culture industry in order to illuminate the ways northern popular culture and soldiers’ claims about selfhood shaped each other during the Civil War. Ambitious soldiers, living in a culture that valorized self-making and working in an economy and a military organization that made upward mobility difficult, tailored their aspirations and seized limited opportunities to produce culture with the goal of gaining recognition among other culture producers in camp, at home, and in cities. An examination of these players and their play—their appreciation of absurdity, the irony of their expressions, and the ways they invested deep cultural meaning in their fun—underscores the significance of the Union’s culture industry for the young men embedded in it and for contemporaries’ understanding of the war they fought.