M.A. Kleen

My latest article is up at Emerging Civil War: “Echoes of Shiloh: Myth, Media, and the Civil War Landscape.”

In “Echoes of Shiloh,” I reflect on how my understanding of the Battle of Shiloh took shape long before I ever set foot on the battlefield, filtered through childhood media and half-remembered images. A worn VHS tape from the 1980s provided my first glimpse of the battle, and though imperfect, it left a lasting imprint on how I imagined it. When I finally visited the battlefield itself, that inherited memory collided with the reality of the ground, where the scale and violence of April 1862 became impossible to ignore.

Shiloh marked a turning point in how Americans understood the war, its staggering casualties stripping away any illusion of a short or limited conflict. Yet what lingers is not just the event, but how it has been remembered, reshaped, and retold over generations. The battlefield today is not a fixed artifact, but a living landscape where history and memory meet. In the end, what I see at Shiloh is inseparable from what I carried there, a reminder that our understanding of the war is always a blend of fact, memory, and meaning.

Check it out!