Everyday Life During the Civil War


Book Description

From soldiers and statesmen to farmers and firing lines, Everyday Life During the Civil War offers an in-depth exploration of this fascinating era. Using dozens of illustrations, timelines, and maps, Varhola illuminates the details of both Northern and Southern life.




Maoists at the Hearth


Book Description

Based on ethnographic research, this book provides insights on the Maoist insurgency from 1996 to 2006, the impact of the war on every day life in the villages and the effect the conflict had on the area even after the war ended.




Everyday Life the Civil War


Book Description

Eleven fascinating historical articles (four or five pages long, and reproducible so teachers can hand them out to students) summarize main points and deliver colorful, memorable details about "everyday life" during the Civil War. Following each illustrated article, three or four reproducible worksheets test comprehension and spark deeper engagement through creative writing, arts and crafts projects, research starters, critical thought questions, what-if scenarios, and other activities. Topics include background and causes, advantages of each side, first battles, the leaders, the soldiers life, the home fronts, innovations, unusual facts (youthful, foreign, and female soldiers), African Americans, hospitals and prisons, and the aftermath. Grades 4-8. Suggested readings. Answer keys.




Every Day of the Civil War


Book Description

From the early seizure of government property during the latter part of 1860 to the final Confederate surrender in 1865, this book provides a day-to-day account of the U.S. Civil War. Although the book provides a daily chronicle of the combat, it is written in narrative form to give readers some continuity as they move from skirmish to skirmish. During the course of the saga, the book also chronicles the life spans of more than 600 Union and Confederate vessels, documenting when possible the time of each vessel's acquisition, commissioning, major engagements, and decommissioning. Seven appendices provide lists of prominent Union and Confederate officers, primary naval actions, and Medal of Honor recipients from 1863 to 1865.




A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction


Book Description

This book provides a succinct and accessible account of the critical role of legal and constitutional issues of the American Civil War.




The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life from Prohibition Through World War II


Book Description

Intended for writers who need authentic background for their writing, but makes a hipper-dipper read for the rest of us palookas, too. Covers popular slang as well as the terms and lingo specific to Prohibition, the Depression, WWII, the crime world, transportation, fashion, radio, and music and dance. Includes chronologies of events, movies, books, and songs. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Emilie Davis’s Civil War


Book Description

Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community. Her diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in “real time” and are a counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period. Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of wartime Philadelphia. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war’s major events, Davis’s diaries give us a rare look at how the war was experienced as a part of everyday life—how its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected a northern city with a vibrant black community.




Union Jacks


Book Description

Historians have given a great deal of attention to the lives and experiences of Civil War soldiers, but surprisingly little is known about navy sailors who participated in the conflict. Michael J. Bennett remedies the longstanding neglect of Civil War seamen in this comprehensive assessment of the experience of common Union sailors from 1861 to 1865. To resurrect the voices of the "Union Jacks," Bennett combed sailors' diaries, letters, and journals. He finds that the sailors differed from their counterparts in the army in many ways. They tended to be a rougher bunch of men than the regular soldiers, drinking and fighting excessively. Those who were not foreign-born, escaped slaves, or unemployed at the time they enlisted often hailed from the urban working class rather than from rural farms and towns. In addition, most sailors enlisted for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. Bennett's examination provides a look into the everyday lives of sailors and illuminates where they came from, why they enlisted, and how their origins shaped their service. By showing how these Union sailors lived and fought on the sea, Bennett brings an important new perspective to our understanding of the Civil War.




The Divided Family in Civil War America


Book Description

The Civil War has long been described as a war pitting "brother against brother." The divided family is an enduring metaphor for the divided nation, but it also accurately reflects the reality of America's bloodiest war. Connecting the metaphor to the real experiences of families whose households were split by conflicting opinions about the war, Amy Murrell Taylor provides a social and cultural history of the divided family in Civil War America. In hundreds of border state households, brothers--and sisters--really did fight one another, while fathers and sons argued over secession and husbands and wives struggled with opposing national loyalties. Even enslaved men and women found themselves divided over how to respond to the war. Taylor studies letters, diaries, newspapers, and government documents to understand how families coped with the unprecedented intrusion of war into their private lives. Family divisions inflamed the national crisis while simultaneously embodying it on a small scale--something noticed by writers of popular fiction and political rhetoric, who drew explicit connections between the ordeal of divided families and that of the nation. Weaving together an analysis of this popular imagery with the experiences of real families, Taylor demonstrates how the effects of the Civil War went far beyond the battlefield to penetrate many facets of everyday life.




Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America


Book Description

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores the ways in which Gilded Age manufacturers, advertisers, publishers, and others commercialized Civil War memory. Advertisers used images of the war to sell everything from cigarettes to sewing machines; an entire industry grew up around uniforms made for veterans rather than soldiers; publishing houses built subscription bases by tapping into wartime loyalties; while old and young alike found endless sources of entertainment that harkened back to the war. Moving beyond the discussions of how Civil War memory shaped politics and race relations, the essays assembled by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney provide a new framework for examining the intersections of material culture, consumerism, and contested memory in the everyday lives of late nineteenth-century Americans. Each essay offers a case study of a product, experience, or idea related to how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized. Taken together, these essays trace the ways the buying and selling of the Civil War shaped Americans’ thinking about the conflict, making an important contribution to scholarship on Civil War memory and extending our understanding of subjects as varied as print, visual, and popular culture; finance; and the histories of education, of the book, and of capitalism in this period. This highly teachable volume presents an exciting intellectual fusion by bringing the subfield of memory studies into conversation with the literature on material culture. The volume’s contributors include Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Shae Smith Cox, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Anna Gibson Holloway, Jonathan S. Jones, Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick, John Neff , Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, David K. Thomson, and Jonathan W. White.