Close-up linocut of a woman with blue and red coloration. Black title, subtitle, and author name aligned left and centered. Close-up linocut of a woman with blue and red coloration. Black title, subtitle, and author name aligned left and centered. Close-up linocut of a woman with blue and red coloration. Black title, subtitle, and author name aligned left and centered.

Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 208
Illustrations: 26 b&w halftones

Civil War
 Rhetoric & Communication
 paperback
 ebook
 hardcover
 Books
 Women's & Gender Studies

Winning Our Wonder

Rhetorical Re/Constructions of American Civil War Women on the Web

Patty Wilde

Paperback
978-1-64336-599-2
Published: Dec 4 2025

$32.99

Hardcover
978-1-64336-598-5
 Published: Dec 4 2025

$114.99

Spiral Bound

 Published:

Ebook
978-1-64336-600-5
 Published: Dec 4 2025

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OA Ebook
978-1-64336-600-5
 Published: Dec 4 2025

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The inclusion of this book in the Open Carolina collection is made possible by the generous funding of

How public memory informs our understanding of gender and race in the Civil War Era and beyond

Who is remembered? Who forgotten? What version of the story is told, repeated, memorialized? Patty Wilde draws on the methods of rhetorical circulation studies to trace how the Civil War stories of influential female figures have evolved in print and online. She charts how depictions of gender and race have been obscured, augmented, and amplified in popular digital resources including websites maintained by the American Battlefield Trust and National Park Service, Esri StoryMaps hosted by the Library of Congress, and Wikipedia.

The accounts of Rose O'Neal Greenhow, Belle Boyd, Harriet Tubman, Sarah Emma Edmonds, Loreta Janeta Velazquez, and Susie King Taylor detailed in Winning Our Wonder not only serve as wellsprings of memory, but act as blueprints for tracing how these women's stories have changed over time and across media. Wilde argues that these visions of the past inform popular memory of the Civil War, an event that continues to haunt contemporary politics, culture, and life, shaping perceptions of citizenship and belonging.



Available in ebook on JSTOR Path to Open

Patty Wilde is associate professor of English and director of composition at Washington State University, Tri-Cities. She has published articles in journals including Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and Peitho.

"Wilde offers a compelling, deeply original analysis of how digital media reshapes the legacies of Civil War women, challenging us to reconsider how and what we remember about the American Civil War."—Kimberly Harrison, Florida International University, author of The Rhetoric of Rebel Women

"Providing rich counter stories to existing hegemonic Civil War narratives, Winning Our Wonder impressively expands archival, commemoration, and rhetorical circulation scholarship by examining the fascinating ways that gendered material artifacts get recollected in digital spaces."—Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Georgia State University, coeditor of Remembering Women Differently