Overview

Household War restores the centrality of households to the American Civil War. The essays in the volume complicate the standard distinctions between battlefront and homefront, soldier and civilian, and men and women. From this vantage point, they look at the interplay of family and politics, studying the ways in which the Civil War shaped and was shaped by the American household. They explore how households influenced Confederate and Union military strategy, the motivations of soldiers and civilians, and the occupation of captured cities, as well as the experiences of Native Americans, women, children, freedpeople, injured veterans, and others. The result is a unique and much needed approach to the study of the Civil War. Household War demonstrates that the Civil War can be understood as a revolutionary moment in the transformation of the household order. The original essays by distinguished historians provide an inclusive examination of how the war flowed from, required, and resulted in the restructuring of the nineteenth-century household. Contributors explore notions of the household before, during, and after the war, unpacking subjects such as home, family, quarrels, domestic service and slavery, manhood, the Klan, prisoners and escaped prisoners, Native Americans, grief, and manhood. The essays further show how households redefined and reordered themselves as a result of the changes stemming from the Civil War.

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9780820356310

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"A useful addition for academic libraries.--L. M. Hauptman ""CHOICE"" The inclusion of both northern and southern households further provides insight into the persistence of shared national values and into the complexity of relationships and loyalties created during this conflict. Organized into four sections, the essays survey the various functions of the household as a provider of emotional and material support, a basis for claims to social and political status, and a site of social challenge and control.--Lynn Kennedy ""Journal of Southern History"""

The inclusion of both northern and southern households further provides insight into the persistence of shared national values and into the complexity of relationships and loyalties created during this conflict. Organized into four sections, the essays survey the various functions of the household as a provider of emotional and material support, a basis for claims to social and political status, and a site of social challenge and control.--Lynn Kennedy Journal of Southern History A useful addition for academic libraries.--L. M. Hauptman CHOICE

A useful addition for academic libraries.--L. M. Hauptman CHOICE

Author Information

Lisa Tendrich Frank is an award-winning historian, editor, and writer on issues related to American women, the nineteenth century, and the American Civil War. She is the co-editor of Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Florida, 2011) and the editor of The World of the Civil War: A Daily Life Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2015) and American Women at War: From the Home Front to the Battlefields (ABC-CLIO, 2012). Leeann Whites is a professor emerita of history at the University of Missouri. She is the author of The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender (Georgia, 2000) and Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and coeditor of Women in Missouri History: In Search of Power and Influence (Missouri, 2004). Stephen Berry is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia. His books include House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War; All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South, and Princes of Cotton: Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848–1860 (Georgia). Angela Esco Elder is the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the antebellum and Civil War era, with an emphasis on gender, emotion, family, and trauma in the American South. Brian Craig Miller is an associate professor of history at Emporia State University. He is the forthcoming editor of the journal Civil War History and the author of John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory and The American Memory: Americans and Their History to 1877.

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