Robert D. Hicks Interview

Matt Crawford speaks with author Robert D. Hicks about his book, Wounded for Life: Seven Union Veterans of the Civil War. Most histories of wounded Civil War veterans construe them as feminized men whose manhood has suffered due to their inability to provide for and raise families or engage in business. Wounded for Life complicates this picture by examining how seven veterans―six soldiers and one physician―coped with their changed bodies in their postwar lives. Through these intimate stories, author Robert D. Hicks looks at the veteran's body as shaped by the trauma of the battlefield and hospital and the construction of a postwar identity in relation to that trauma. Through his research, he reveals the changing social circumstances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they impacted the traumatized veteran's body. This engaging book is equal parts Civil War history, disability and gender history, and the history of the body that discloses the impact of war on a wounded warrior.