With a new preface and updated historiographical essay. Based on recent scholarship and deep research in primary sources, especially the letters and diaries of “ordinary people,” The Northern Home Front during the Civil War is the first full narrative history and analysis of the northern home front in almost a quarter-century. It examines the mobilization, recruitment, management, politics, costs, and experience of war from the perspective of the home front, with special attention to the ways the war affected the ideas, identities, interests, and issues shaping people’s lives, and vice versa. The book looks closely at people’s responses to war’s demands, whether in supporting the Union cause or opposing it, and it measures the ways the war transformed society and economy or simply reconfirmed ideas and reinforced practices already underway. As The Northern Home Front during the Civil War reveals, issues and concerns of emancipation, conscription, civil liberties, economic policies and practices, religion, party politics, war management, popular culture, and work were all part of what Lincoln rightly termed “a People’s Contest” and as much as the armies in the field determined the outcome of the nation’s ordeal by fire. As The Northern Home Front during the Civil War shows, understanding the experience of the women and men on the home front is essential to realizing Walt Whitman’s oft-quoted call to get “the real war” into the books.

More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, often focusing on Lincoln’s determination to save the Union, or highlighting the brutality of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet the frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battle fronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation’s consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation’s past, present, and future. A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.

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While soldiers were off fighting on the fields of war, civilians on the home front fought their own daily struggles, sometimes removed from the violence but often enough from deep within the maelstrom of conflict. Chapters provide readers with an excellent, detailed description of how women, children, slaves, and Native Americans coped with privation and looming threat, and how they often used, or tried to use, periods of turmoil to their own advantage. While it is the soldiers who are often remembered for their strength, honor, and courage, it is the civilians who keep life going during wartime. This volume presents the lives of these brave citizens during the early colonial era, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. This volume begins with Armstrong Starkey's detailed description of wartime life during the American Colonial era, beginning with the Jamestown, VA settlement of 1607. Among his discussions of civilian lives during the Pequot War, King Philip's War, and the Seven Years' War, Starkey also examines Native American attitudes regarding war, Puritan lives, and Salem witchcraft and its connection to war. Wayne E. Lee continues with his chapter on the American Revolution, investigating how difficult it was for civilians to choose sides, including a telling look at soldier recruitment strategies. He also surveys how inflation and shortages adversely affected civilians, in addition to disease, women's roles, slaves, and Native Americans as civilians. Richard V. Barbuto discusses the War of 1812, taking a close look at life on the ever-expanding frontier, rural homes and families, and jobs and education in city life. Gregory S. Hospodor observes American life during the Mexican War, examining how that conflict amplified domestic tensions caused by sharply divided but closely-held beliefs about national expansion and slavery. Continuing, James Marten looks at southern life in the South during the Civil War, examining the constant burden of supporting Confederate armies or coping with invading northern ones. Paul A. Cimbala concludes this volume with a look at northerner's lives during the Civil War, offering an outstanding essay on a home front mobilized for a titanic struggle, and how the war, no matter how remote, became omnipresent in daily life.

The American Civil War had a devastating impact on countless numbers of common soldiers and civilians. This book shows how average Americans coped with despair as well as hope during this vast upheaval.

Lesser Civil Wars: Civilians Defining War and the Memory of War is an edited volume that surveys three hundred years of the Memory of war and the Will to war in the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region. Military theorists from von Clausewitz, to Dingiswayo and Chandragupta, calculated the Will of their own soldiers and of the enemy’s soldiers. Sometimes the Will is assigned an erroneously low strength, as Abraham Lincoln learned quickly at the onset of the United States Civil War. In this volume, we examine the civilian production of the national Will to fight future wars through the least civil war – each individual’s war to remember or to forget – and no armistice or accord brings this internal battle to an end. This is not a book about the atrocities committed during war. This is a book about the very nature of the Will-Memory-Will cycle, where the Memory of war continues for generations until a new war requires the resurrection of the Will. As these essays show, sometimes it only takes a few individuals to prosecute these Memory wars with rules of engagement that do not necessarily include civil behavior. By focusing on microhistories from a specific region and by bracketing the US Civil War with an essay about a century prior to it and essays about the century following it, we are able to demonstrate the power and energy of the incubating stage of Memory in the Will-Memory-Will cycle. In the greater Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region, ordinary civilians controlled and incubated the memories of the Iroquois Wars, the French and Indian/Sevens’ Years War (1756–1763), the American Revolution (1776–1783) and the War of 1812, and they converted Memory into the Will to fight the US Civil War and the Vietnam War. In these chapters, we present micro-wars between civilians over control of the Will of a nation. They are, indeed, lesser civil wars.

For someone who did not actually fight in the American Civil War, Stephen Crane was extraordinarily accurate in his description of the psychological tension experienced by a youthful soldier grappling with his desire to act heroically, his fears, and redemption. Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage provides an extraordinary take on the battlefield experiences of a young soldier coming of age under extreme circumstances. His writing took place a generation after the war's conclusion, at a time when the entire nation was coming to grips with the meaning of the Civil War. It was during this time in the late 19th century that the battle over the memory of the war was taking place. This new, annotated edition of the novel is designed to guide readers through references made through Crane's characters and how they reflect Civil War military experiences—specifically how "the youth's" experiences reflect the reality of the multi-day battle of Chancellorsville, which took place in Virginia beginning on May 1, 1863, and concluded on May 4 of the same year. The annotated text is preceded by introductory essays on Crane and on the Civil War. Crane's short story "The Veteran" is also included to allow readers to better understand the post-war lives of Civil War soldiers.

Established in 1992, the Klement Lecture brings to campus distinguished scholars in American history. Originally devoted to the history of the sectional conflict, the series now includes all fields of American history. Frank L. Klement, who died in 1994 at the age of 86, received his Ph. D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1946. He taught briefly at Lake Forest College and at Eau Claire State Teachers College before joining the history department at Marquette University in 1948. Before his retirement twenty-seven years later with the rank of Professor Emeritus, Frank served as dep.