From Civility to Survival: Richmond Ladies During the Civil War


Book Description

Motivated by their patriotism, the Richmond Ladies were willing to make the necessary sacrifices for the Southern cause. Many sent their husbands and sons to fight for the glory of the South. However, as the war progressed, their sacrifices became harder and harder to bear. They faced shortages of food, struggled to find adequate housing, and, in some cases, endured the ultimate price of losing husbands, sons, and close relatives. As Richmond was evacuated, they braced themselves for military occupation and reconstruction. With the loss of their slaves, wealth, social standing, and homes, they entered into a new world order with few familiar aspects. Through their diaries and recollections, their story of courage and commitment to survive in an ever changing world is told. Neal Wixson selected detailed, poignant and sentimental excerpts from some of the most important accounts of Richmond during the Civil War which succeeds in capturing much of the flavor of the Confederate capital as seen through womens eyes. Michael B. Chesson, Professor of History, The American College of History and Legal Studies and author of several books including Richmond after the War 1865-1890 A vivid account of wartime Richmond as told by women who endured its physical and emotional hardships. Carol Sheriff , Professor of History, College of William & Mary and author of The Artificial River and of co-author of A People at War By giving voice to the ladies who lived in Richmond during the Civil War, Neal Wixson offers a chorus of their faith and perseverance in enduring deprivations and sacrifice. Will Molineux, editor of A Young Virginia Boatman Navigates the Civil War




Civil War Richmond: The Last Citadel


Book Description

Few American cities have experienced the trauma of wartime destruction. As the capital of the new Confederate States of America, situated only ninety miles from the enemy capital at Washington, D.C., Richmond was under constant threat. The civilian population suffered not only shortage and hardship but also constant anxiety. During the war, the city more than doubled in population and became the industrial center of a prolonged and costly war effort. The city transformed with the creation of a massive hospital system, military training camps, new industries and shifting social roles for everyone, including women and African Americans. Local historians Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell detail the excitement, and eventually bitter disappointment, of Richmond at war.




Confederate Citadel


Book Description

Richmond, Virginia: pride of the founding fathers, doomed capital of the Confederate States of America. Unlike other Southern cities, Richmond boasted a vibrant, urban industrial complex capable of producing crucial ammunition and military supplies. Despite its northern position, Richmond became the Confederacy's beating heart—its capital, second-largest city, and impenetrable citadel. As long as the city endured, the Confederacy remained a well-supplied and formidable force. But when Ulysses S. Grant broke its defenses in 1865, the Confederates fled, burned Richmond to the ground, and surrendered within the week. Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War offers a detailed portrait of life's daily hardships in the rebel capital during the Civil War. Here, barricaded against a siege, staunch Unionists became a dangerous fifth column, refugees flooded the streets, and women organized a bread riot in the city. Drawing on personal correspondence, private diaries, and newspapers, author Mary A. DeCredico spotlights the human elements of Richmond's economic rise and fall, uncovering its significance as the South's industrial powerhouse throughout the Civil War.




Spy of Richmond


Book Description

When living a lie is the right thing to do The Confederate capital in the height of the Civil War: no place for a Union loyalist. But just the place for a spy. Her father a slaveholder, her suitor a Confederate officer, and she an abolitionist, Sophie Kent must walk a tightrope of deception in her efforts to end slavery. As suspicion in Richmond rises, Sophie’s espionage becomes more and more dangerous. If her courage will carry her through, what will be lost along the way—her true love, her father, her life? Series note: Spy of Richmond is a work of fiction inspired by first-person accounts of Union loyalists and Confederates living in Richmond during the Civil War. This is the fourth and last book in the series Heroines Behind the Lines: Civil War, which offers an inside look at women’s contributions during times of war. For more information about the series, visit heroinesbehindthelines.com.




Curiosities of the Confederate Capital


Book Description

Uncover the secrets of the River City’s Confederate past. In the early days of the Civil War, Richmond was declared the capital of the Confederacy, and until now, countless stories from its tenure as the Southern headquarters have remained buried. Mary E. Walker, a Union doctor and feminist, was once held captive in the city for refusing to wear proper women’s clothing. A coffee substitute factory exploded under intriguing circumstances. Many Confederate soldiers, when in the trenches of battle, thumbed through the pages of Hugo’s Les Miserables. Author Brian Burns reveals these and many more curious tales of Civil War Richmond.




Heroines Behind the Lines Series (Set of 4 books)


Book Description

This set includes all four books of the Heroines Behind the Lines Series: Wedded to War, Widow of Gettysburg, Yankee in Atlanta, and Spy of Richmond. The Heroines Behind the Lines Series highlights the crucial contributions made by women during the Civil War. In Wedded to War, Charlotte chooses a life of service over privilege, just as her childhood friend had done when he became a military doctor. She soon discovers that she’s combatting more than just the rebellion by becoming a nurse. Will the two men who love her simply stand by and watch as she fights her own battles? Or will their desire for her wage war on her desire to serve God? In Widow of Gettysburg, the farm of Union widow Liberty Holloway is disfigured into a Confederate field hospital, bringing her face to face with unspeakable suffering—and a Confederate scout who awakens her long dormant heart. Will Liberty be defined by the tragedy in her life, or will she find a way to triumph over it? In Yankee in Atlanta, soldier Caitlin McKae wakes up in Atlanta after being wounded in battle. The Georgian doctor who treated her believed Caitlin's only secret was that she had been fighting for the Confederacy disguised as a man. To avoid arrest or worse, Caitlin hides her true identity and makes a new life for herself in Atlanta. When Sherman’s troops edge closer to Atlanta, Caitlin tries to escape north, but is arrested on charges of being a spy. Will honor dictate that Caitlin follow the rules, or love demand that she break them? In Spy of Richmond, Union loyalist Sophie Kent attempts to end the war from within the Confederate capital, but she can’t do it alone. As Sophie’s spy network grows, she walks a tightrope of deception, using her father’s position as newspaper editor and a suitor’s position in the ordnance bureau. When her espionage endangers the people she loves, she's forced to make a life-and-death gamble.




Busy Hands


Book Description

Focusing on middle-class women's contributions to the northern Civil War effort, Patricia Richard shows how women utilized their power as moral agents to shape the way men survived the ravages of war. Busy Hands investigates the ways in which white and African American women used images of family and domestic life in their relief efforts to counter the effects of prostitution, gambling, profanity, and drinking, threatening men's postwar civilian fitness. Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs of Civil War nurses, sanitary workers, soldiers, and the soldiers' aid societies, Richard develops a new perspective on domestic influence on the war, as women sought to save soldiers from the dangers of the military world.




Initiating Acts : the Role of Rupture in the Formation of North American Cultural Identities


Book Description

Abstract: This project is an examination and a recasting of historical events as performances and the residue of those events in contemporary popular cultures. The historical events I am exploring can be divided into three sections. The first section explores Africans' participation in the circum-Atlantic Slave Trade as actors instead of unwitting victims, as well as the happenings aboard slave ships during the Middle Passage and subsequently the auction block and slave pens. The second section examines plantation life in the Antebellum South from the vantage point of a person performing the role of a mistress, maid, slave and master through a close reading of selected diary entries, passages from autobiographies, journal publications and selected private journal entries, respectively. The historical is then linked to the contemporary in the last section of this project by "citing" the parallels, residue, and mutations of the roles from the plantation household to Hip-Hop culture ...







Chambers's Encyclopaedia


Book Description