women into a position of power and authority that during the antebellum period they had only known, perhaps, in private. Between 1861 and 1865 more than twenty thousand women in the Union and Confederate states engaged in government and regimental Civil War hospitals, both as nurses and matrons. By fighting "disease, infection, and the medical infrastructure itself" they combined the nineteenth-century ideal of born nurturers with a new "soldierly aura" (Schultz, Women at the Front 3). By mid-war this somewhat awkward combination was a standard formula in numerous non-fictional and fictional nursing narratives, a sentimental subgenre that remained extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. After 1865, the image of the self-sacrificial female humanitarian, who ignored sectional loyalties for the higher cause of saving lives, was a central emblem of the long-lived, and very powerful postwar discourses of cross-sectional reconciliation and national healing. First inspired by Abraham Lincoln's March 4, 1865, reworking of Psalm 147:3 in his Second Inaugural Address, to "bind up the nation's wounds" was America's peacetime credo for years to come. 1 Indeed, the praise of female nurses was a mainstay at veteran events, culminating with the 1924 unveiling of the "Nuns of the Battlefield" Memorial in Washington D.C. 2 On a less official level however, postwar reactions to the new female ideal of soldiering caretaker were by far more mixed and ambivalent. In some of the fiction of the day, female relief workers are deeply ambiguous literary figures that pose a threat, not only to the heterosexual order, but also to American culture at large. Together with the concept of male patient, the female nurse is part of a more general gendered constellation that preoccupied American society during the postwar era. Analyzing this constellation inspires a greater understanding of what may be called the American Reconstruction mind. Moving beyond established definitions of this era as social, political, and economic

Intertwined in processes of ideological meaning-making, wheat has been particularly successful in pairing its genetic assets with a powerful symbolic charge in US-American culture. The sense of agency that US culture attaches to wheat is subsumed under paradigms of organized personhood such as the nation and the corporation. Artists and writers have merged the idea of “wheat power” with the fears and hopes of their specific historical moment.Wheat is not only genetically complex but has also been exceptionally culturally defined. Interestingly, some cultural representations of wheat emphasize what may be referred to as plant agency. This is particularly striking in North American art and literature. There is often a certain wildness, independence, and power to wheat that are lacking in other cultivated crops. Focusing on the 19th and early 20th centuries, this article examines the active role of wheat in shaping US-American history and society. Starting from the assumption that cultural artefacts help societies to understand and negotiate their norms and values, I take a look at a painting (Emanuel Leutze’s Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields on the Approach of the British from 1852) and a novel (Frank Norris’s The Octopus from 1901) to analyze their representation of the human-wheat relationship. Using a historicizing, philological approach, this case study contributes to a debate in the environmental humanities that seeks to redefine the human-crop relationship in times of climate change, diminishing biodiversity, and human population growth. Can the American legacy of wheat help us to reframe the human-wheat relationship? Are there potential pitfalls of crop agency as it is depicted in American representations of wheat?

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

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