The Civil War
Although the Press has always been an important publisher of books about the Civil War, under the editorship of Matthew Hodgson (1970-92) it began seeking out "new" studies to augment its fine list of Civil War titles.
Civil War Battles
Those Who Fought
Wars are fought by people, and one specialty of the Press has been
books that convey the human side of war. Henry Kyd Douglas's I Rode
With Stonewall: The War Experiences of the Youngest Member of Jackson's
Staff has been a perennial seller since 1940. Douglas's memoir, based
on his own Civil War diaries and begun soon after the end of the war, lay
in a garret from 1899 until 1939, when it was discovered and brought to
the Press.
Alice Raines Trulock's beautifully written biography, In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain and the American Civil War (1992), is one of the rare Civil War books authored by a woman. Chamberlain, an academic and theologian by training, was one of the heroes of Gettysburg. After the war he served four terms as governor of Maine and later became the president of Bowdoin College. Trulock, an independent scholar whose career had been in personnel management and politics, spent over ten years researching and writing the book, only to die just before its publication.
Those Who Stayed Home
Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention: Women of the
Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996) was the first work
to examine the war's impact on Confederate women's identity. Basing her
research on diaries, letters, essays, and literature, Faust chronicles the
clash between old traditions and wartime chaos, deprivation, and loss in
elite women who had been both the beneficiaries and the victims of the Old
South's social order. She concludes that their response was to invent
"new" selves designed in large measure to resist change and to salvage as
much of the old as could survive in the altered postwar world.
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