During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers' bodies were transformed into "dead heaps of ruins," novel sights in the southern landscape. This is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change.

MEGAN KATE NELSON is a writer, historian, and cultural critic. Based in Lincoln, Massachusetts, she has written about Civil War and western history for a number of national publications. Nelson also writes a regular column on Civil War popular culture, "Stereoscope," for Civil War Monitor, and her blog, Historista examines the "surprising and weird ways that people engage with history in everyday life." Nelson is also the author of Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Georgia). She has taught at Texas Tech University; California State University, Fullerton; Harvard University; and Brown University.