Mary Chesnut's Diary

Mary Chesnut's Diary PDF Author: Mary Boykin Chesnut
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101513985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unrivalled account of the American Civil War from the Confederate perspective. One of the most compelling personal narratives of the Civil War, Mary Chesnut's Diary was written between 1861 and 1865. As the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and the wife of an aide to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, Chesnut was well acquainted with the Confederacy's prominent players and-from the very first shots in Charleston, South Carolina-diligently recorded her impressions of the conflict's most significant moments. One of the most frequently cited memoirs of the war, Mary Chesnut's Diary captures the urgency and nuance of the period in an epic rich with commentary on race, status, and power within a nation divided. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Mary Chesnut's Diary

Mary Chesnut's Diary PDF Author: Mary Boykin Chesnut
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101513985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unrivalled account of the American Civil War from the Confederate perspective. One of the most compelling personal narratives of the Civil War, Mary Chesnut's Diary was written between 1861 and 1865. As the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and the wife of an aide to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, Chesnut was well acquainted with the Confederacy's prominent players and-from the very first shots in Charleston, South Carolina-diligently recorded her impressions of the conflict's most significant moments. One of the most frequently cited memoirs of the war, Mary Chesnut's Diary captures the urgency and nuance of the period in an epic rich with commentary on race, status, and power within a nation divided. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A Diary from Dixie

A Diary from Dixie PDF Author: Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is the author's Civil War diary from February 18, 1861, to June 26, 1865. She was an eyewitness to many historic events as she accompanied her husband to significant sites of the Civil War.

The Private Mary Chesnut

The Private Mary Chesnut PDF Author: Mary Boykin Chesnut
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195035131
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian C. Vann Woodward and Chesnut's biographer Elisabeth Muhlenfeld present here the previously unpublished Civil War diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut. The ideal diarist, Mary Chesnut was at the right place at the right time with the right connections. Daughter of one senator from South Carolina and wife of another, she had kin and friends all over the Confederacy and knew intimately its political and military leaders. At Montgomery when the new nation was founded, at Charleston when the war started, and at Richmond during many crises, she traveled extensively during the war. She watched a world "literally kicked to pieces" and left the most vivid account we have of the death throes of a society. The diaries, filled with personal revelations and indiscretions, are indispensable to an appreciation of our most famous Southern literary insight into the Civil War experience.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic

Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic PDF Author: Julia A. Stern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226773310
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
A genteel southern intellectual, saloniste, and wife to a prominent colonel in Jefferson Davis’s inner circle, Mary Chesnut today is remembered best for her penetrating Civil War diary. Composed between 1861 and 1865 and revised thoroughly from the late 1870s until Chesnut’s death in 1886, the diary was published first in 1905, again in 1949, and later, to great acclaim, in 1981. This complicated literary history and the questions that attend it—which edition represents the real Chesnut? To what genre does this text belong?—may explain why the document largely has, until now, been overlooked in literary studies. Julia A. Stern’s critical analysis returns Chesnut to her rightful place among American writers. In Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic, Stern argues that the revised diary offers the most trenchant literary account of race and slavery until the work of Faulkner and that, along with his Yoknapatawpha novels, it constitutes one of the two great Civil War epics of the American canon. By restoring Chesnut’s 1880s revision to its complex, multidecade cultural context, Stern argues both for Chesnut’s reinsertion into the pantheon of nineteenth-century American letters and for her centrality to the literary history of women’s writing as it evolved from sentimental to tragic to realist forms.

Mary Chesnut's Civil War

Mary Chesnut's Civil War PDF Author: Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300029796
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 964

Get Book Here

Book Description
An authorized account of the Civil War, drawn from the diaries of a Southern aristocrat, records the disintegration and final destruction of the Confederacy

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Mary Boykin Chesnut PDF Author: Mary A. DeCredico
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780945612476
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
Born into the plantation gentry of South Carolina, granted the advantages of wealth, social position, and education by virtue of her family and her marriage to another prominent South Carolina family, Mary Chesnut has emerged as one of the key figures in American history, but not because of a career, her family, or her involvement in a humanitarian cause. Rather, Chesnut's significance comes from her extensive diary. Her commentary and reminiscences about the era provide an excellent window into the life and death of the Confederate nation. Her keen insight into political, economic, and social developments makes her an excellent source to understand the Southern homefront during the American Civil War. Professor Mary DeCredico uses Chesnut's life to address the role of women in the South; the ideology and leadership of the Southern white elite; and how Southern women in general, and Chesnut in particular, viewed the institution of slavery. Furthermore, DeCredico shows how Mary Chesnut's privileged position gave her an ideal perspective for observing and commenting on the events of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

William Howard Russell's Civil War

William Howard Russell's Civil War PDF Author: William Howard Russell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332003
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
Having won renown in the 1850s for his vivid warfront dispatches from the Crimea, William Howard Russell was the most celebrated foreign journalist in America during the first year of the Civil War. As a special correspondent for The Times of London, Russell was charged with explaining the American crisis to a British audience, but his reports also had great impact in America. They so alienated both sides, North and South, that Russell was forced to return to England prematurely in April 1862. My Diary North and South (1863), Russell's published account of his visit remains a classic of Civil War literature. It was not in fact a diary but a narrative reconstruction of the author's journeys and observations based on his private notebooks and published dispatches. Despite his severe criticisms of American society and conduct, Russell offered in that work generally sympathetic characterizations of the Northern and Southern leadership during the war. In this new volume, Martin Crawford brings together the journalist's original diary and a selection of his private correspondence to resurrect the fully uninhibited Russell and to provide, accordingly, a true documentary record of this important visitor's first impressions of America during the early months of its greatest crisis. Over the course of his visit, Russell traveled widely throughout the Union and the new Confederacy, meeting political and social leaders on both sides. Included here are spontaneous - and often unflattering - comments on such prominent figures as William H. Seward, Jefferson Davis, Mary Todd Lincoln, and George B. McClellan, as well as quick sketches of New York, Washington, New Orleans, and other cities. Alsorevealed for the first time are the anxiety and despair that Russell experienced during his visit - a state induced by his own self-doubt, by concern over the health and situation of his wife in England, and, finally, by the bitter criticism he received in America over his reports, especially his famous description of the Union retreat from Bull Run in July 1861. A sometimes vain and pompous figure, Russell also emerges here as an individual of exceptional tenacity - a man who abhorred slavery and remained convinced of the essential rectitude of the Northern cause even as he criticized Northern leaders, their lack of preparedness for war, and the apparent disunity of the Northern population. In calmer times, Crawford notes, Russell's independent qualities might have brought him admiration, but in the turbulent climate of Civil War America they succeeded only in arousing deep suspicion.

Keep the Days

Keep the Days PDF Author: Steven M. Stowe
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964097X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance—and the limits—of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807855737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

"Journal of a Secesh Lady"

Author: Catherine Devereux Edmondston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Halifax County (N.C.)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description