《看得见的邦联》是对美国邦联商业和政府创造的视觉和物质文化的综合分析。虽然历史学家主要通过印刷文本研究邦联身份，但这本书表明，邦联还通过其他媒体建立并分享了他们的身份：戏剧表演、军事服装、制成品和各种其他材料。罗斯·A·布鲁克斯（Ross A.Brooks）通过研究之前未经研究且经常未发表的视觉和纪录片来源，提供了关于邦联身份认同感、种族、性别和独立观念的新视角，以及这些观念是如何将它们结合和分开的。
布鲁克斯的作品通过揭示图像和物体如何为南方社会提供新的窗口，以及对南方公民的更丰富理解，补充了围绕南方联盟国家的史学。布鲁克斯在之前对邦联图像和物质文化的图像学和图像学研究的基础上，添加了更广泛的政府和商业生成的图像和对象。他研究的不仅是流行或高级艺术和政府制作的图像，还包括低俗艺术、短暂的戏剧作品，以及南方人创作的短暂艺术品。总的来说，这些材料提供了各种各样的视角，通过这些视角来探索和分析南部邦联公民的各种优先事项、意识形态断层线和世界观。
布鲁克斯的研究是第一部广泛使用图像和物体作为研究南方邦联基础的学术著作之一。他的作品为研究邦联关于种族、奴隶制、性别、独立和战争的思想提供了新的途径，并对促成邦联民族主义的意图和因素提供了见解。可见的邦联加深了我们对邦联是什么的理解，邦联为什么而战，以及为什么他们的愿景在邦联存在之后的这么长时间里一直存在于记忆和想象中。视觉和物质文化不仅捕捉到了紧张局势，还捕捉到了同盟者共有的幻觉和错觉。
The Visible Confederacy: Images and Objects in the Civil War South
The Visible Confederacy is a comprehensive analysis of the commercially and government-generated visual and material culture of the Confederate States of America. While historians have mainly studied Confederate identity through printed texts, this book shows that Confederates also built and shared a sense of who they were through other media: theatrical performances, military clothing, manufactured goods, and an assortment of other material. Examining previously understudied and often unpublished visual and documentary sources, Ross A. Brooks provides new perspectives on Confederates’ sense of identity and ideas about race, gender, and independence, as well as how those conceptions united and divided them.
Brooks’s work complements the historiography surrounding the Confederate nation by revealing how imagery and objects offer new windows on southern society and a richer understanding of Confederate citizens. Brooks builds substantially upon previous studies of the iconology and iconography of Confederate imagery and material culture by adding a broader range of government and commercially generated images and objects. He examines not only popular or high art and government-produced imagery, but also lowbrow art, transitory theatrical productions, and ephemeral artifacts generated by southerners. Collectively, these materials provide a variety of lenses through which to explore and assay the various priorities, ideological fault lines, and worldviews of Confederate citizens.
Brooks’s study is one of the first extensive academic works to use imagery and objects as the basis for studying the Confederate South. His work provides fresh avenues for examining Confederate ideas about race, slavery, gender, independence, and the war, and it offers insight into the intentions and factors that contributed to the creation of Confederate nationalism. The Visible Confederacy furthers our understanding of what the Confederacy was, what Confederates fought for, and why their vision has persisted in memory and imagination for so long beyond the Confederacy’s existence. Visual and material culture captured not only the tensions, but also the illusions and delusions that Confederates shared.
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