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Author: Daniel Blake Smith
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466879386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
In the early years after the Revolution, Americans were on the move, seeking to establish a new way of life. And, more than the church or the school or the courthouse, it was the family that nurtured the American Dream. In this novel-like narrative, Daniel Blake Smith vividly brings to life the Fletchers, a family of loving, ambitious, at times insecure pioneers who scattered across the vast expanse of post-revolutionary America but kept in touch through letters despite their wildly different life paths. On a hard scrabble farm in Vermont, the patriarch, Jesse Fletcher, struggled with debt and depression but managed to educate his children, especially his son Elijah, a Yankee who moved to Virginia, shocked by the horrors of slavery but then seduced by the plantation lifestyle. Another son, Calvin, left at age 17 for Indianapolis to become a self-made lawyer, banker, and a prominent citizen and passionate abolitionist. The grandchildren include Indiana, a women's education activist who donated her home to create Sweet Briar College; black sheep Lucian, who went to California to join in the gold rush; and physician Billy captured as a spy during the Civil War. Through letters and diaries, we find in Our Family Dreams that the Fletchers appear surprisingly similar to us; they dream, fret, fight, and love. Despite numerous heartaches and setbacks, their spirit of enterprise, sacrifice, mobility, and education endures as American values to this day.
Author: Daniel Blake Smith
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466879386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the early years after the Revolution, Americans were on the move, seeking to establish a new way of life. And, more than the church or the school or the courthouse, it was the family that nurtured the American Dream. In this novel-like narrative, Daniel Blake Smith vividly brings to life the Fletchers, a family of loving, ambitious, at times insecure pioneers who scattered across the vast expanse of post-revolutionary America but kept in touch through letters despite their wildly different life paths. On a hard scrabble farm in Vermont, the patriarch, Jesse Fletcher, struggled with debt and depression but managed to educate his children, especially his son Elijah, a Yankee who moved to Virginia, shocked by the horrors of slavery but then seduced by the plantation lifestyle. Another son, Calvin, left at age 17 for Indianapolis to become a self-made lawyer, banker, and a prominent citizen and passionate abolitionist. The grandchildren include Indiana, a women's education activist who donated her home to create Sweet Briar College; black sheep Lucian, who went to California to join in the gold rush; and physician Billy captured as a spy during the Civil War. Through letters and diaries, we find in Our Family Dreams that the Fletchers appear surprisingly similar to us; they dream, fret, fight, and love. Despite numerous heartaches and setbacks, their spirit of enterprise, sacrifice, mobility, and education endures as American values to this day.
Author: Nicole Etcheson
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700635157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
For all that has been written about the Civil War's impact on the urban northeast and southern home fronts, we have until now lacked a detailed picture of how it affected specific communities in the Union's Midwestern heartland. Nicole Etcheson offers a deeply researched microhistory of one such community--Putnam County, Indiana, from the Compromise of 1850 to the end of Reconstruction-and shows how its citizens responded to and were affected by the war. Delving into the everyday life of a small town in one of the nineteenth century's bellwether states, A Generation at War considers the Civil War within a much broader chronological context than other accounts. It ranges across three decades to show how the issues of the day-particularly race and sectionalism-temporarily displaced economic and temperance concerns, how the racial attitudes of northern whites changed, and how a generation of young men and women coped with the transformative experience of war. Etcheson interrelates an impressively wide range of topics. Through temperance and alcohol she illustrates nativism and class consciousness, while through an account of a murder she probes ethnicity, politics, and gender. She reveals how some women wanted to "maintain dependence" and how the war gave independence to others, as pensions allowed them to survive without a male provider. And she chronicles the major shift in race relations as the most revolutionary change: blacks had been excluded from Indiana in the 1850s but were invited into Putnam County by 1880. Etcheson personalizes all of these issues through human stories, bringing to life people previously ignored by history, whether veterans demanding recognition of their sacrifice, women speaking out against liquor, or Copperheads parading against Republicans. The introduction of race with the North Carolina Exodusters marks a particularly effective lens for seeing how the idealism unleashed by Lincoln's war influenced the North. Etcheson also helps us understand how white Southerners tried to reunify the country on the basis of shared white racism. Drawing on personal papers, local newspapers, pension petitions, Exoduster pamphlets, and more, Etcheson demonstrates how microhistory helps give new meaning to larger events. A Generation at War opens a new window on the impact of the Civil War on the agrarian North.
Author: Michael Barton
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
"Was Johnny Reb more romantic than Billy Yank, and Billy more repressed? Historians have long debated what essential differences there were between the North and the Old South at the time of the Civil War, but their investigations have relied exclusively on the tools of their own discipline. This book examines the same question through the methods of social science. Rather than conjecturing about the attitudes and values of the period, the author has taken a large sample of primary documents and evaluated their differences by means of content analysis. The sample consists of more than 400 diaries and collections of letters written by officers and enlisted men from all states in the Civil War. Excerpts from these documents provide a fascinating glimpse of the period, but the most important conclusions result from Dr. Barton's statistical analyses, which by turns support and refute commonly held notions of how Northerners and Southerners viewed themselves and each other."--book jacket.
Author: Louise A. Arnold-Friend
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 716
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Book Description
Author: Daniel E. Sutherland
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807832774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
Examines the impact that guerrilla warfare had on the Civil War, discussing how Confederate guerrillas' increasing use of plunder and violence led to a decline of support for them among Southerners and was a factor in the final defeat of the South.
Author: Christopher Phillips
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195187237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
Most Americans imagine the Civil War in terms of clear and defined boundaries of freedom and slavery: a straightforward division between the slave states of Kentucky and Missouri and the free states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas. However, residents of these western border states, Abraham Lincoln's home region, had far more ambiguous identities-and contested political loyalties-than we commonly assume. In The Rivers Ran Backward, Christopher Phillips sheds light on the fluid political cultures of the "Middle Border" states during the Civil War era. Far from forming a fixed and static boundary between the North and South, the border states experienced fierce internal conflicts over their political and social loyalties. White supremacy and widespread support for the existence of slavery pervaded the "free" states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which had much closer economic and cultural ties to the South, while those in Kentucky and Missouri held little identification with the South except over slavery. Debates raged at every level, from the individual to the state, in parlors, churches, schools, and public meeting places, among families, neighbors, and friends. Ultimately, the pervasive violence of the Civil War and the cultural politics that raged in its aftermath proved to be the strongest determining factor in shaping these states' regional identities, leaving an indelible imprint on the way in which Americans think of themselves and others in the nation. The Rivers Ran Backward reveals the complex history of the western border states as they struggled with questions of nationalism, racial politics, secession, neutrality, loyalty, and even place-as the Civil War tore the nation, and themselves, apart. In this major work, Phillips shows that the Civil War was more than a conflict pitting the North against the South, but one within the West that permanently reshaped American regions.
Author: W Lesser
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1402228740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
Robert E. Lee's first defeats and the battles that shaped the Civil War.
Author: Garold Cole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Author: Eugene Converse Murdock
Publisher: Scholarly Title
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 792
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Book Description
Author: Stephen D. Engle
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469629348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 737
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Book Description
In this rich study of Union governors and their role in the Civil War, Stephen D. Engle examines how these politicians were pivotal in securing victory. In a time of limited federal authority, governors were an essential part of the machine that maintained the Union while it mobilized and sustained the war effort. Charged with the difficult task of raising soldiers from their home states, these governors had to also rally political, economic, and popular support for the conflict, at times against a backdrop of significant local opposition. Engle argues that the relationship between these loyal-state leaders and Lincoln's administration was far more collaborative than previously thought. While providing detailed and engaging portraits of these men, their state-level actions, and their collective cooperation, Engle brings into new focus the era's complex political history and shows how the Civil War tested and transformed the relationship between state and federal governments.
