Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians 1861-1865 Panelists discussion
C-SPAN Panelists discussed Mark Grimsley’s book, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865, which was the featured book of the 2012 Civil War Institute Summer Conference at Gettysburg College. He responded to questions from the audience. Coincidentily I am in the middle of our Civil War unit in my APUSH Class and we discussed Hard War today. To watch this excellent panel discussion click here.
Read more...The Hardening Effect from Combat on Civil War Soldiers
The process of “hardening” (via the experience of battle over a period of time) has been analyzed by historians and interpreted in several different ways. James M. McPherson saw the stress (combat fatigue) of combat as a breaking down of the soldier’s senses (“the nerve to endure”) thus subduing the awareness to suffering. That though they saw horrible things, they could rise above it and McPherson stressed the importance of…
Read more...The 11th Wisconsin in the Civil War A Regimental History – PAPER BACK EDITION!
After 12 years since the original hardcover publication McFarland has decided to release a paperback edition as it as sold well. This is very exciting. This volume details the Civil War experiences of the 11th Wisconsin Volunteers as they traveled more than 9000 miles in the service of their country. The book looks at the attitude prevalent in Wisconsin at the start of the war and discusses the background of…
Read more...Book Review: EXTREME CIVIL WAR: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier
[Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier by Matthew M. Stith (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Hardcover, map, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages: 230. ISBN:978-0-8071-6314-6. $42.50] The Civil War as total war has been a topic of discussion on this blog and on many others; not to mention for a long time in publications and among historians. Though Mark Grimsley’s study The Hard Hand War, for…
Read more...BOOK REVIEW: Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories
Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories BY: Ronald S. Coddington Hardcover: 280 pages, 77 halftones Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (August 3, 2004) ISBN-10: 0801878764 ISBN-13: 978-0801878763 This book has obviously been out for a while now and how I came to possess it had nothing to do with the book other than it had a snippet on a soldier in the…
Read more...“Shook Over Hell” Post-Traumatic Stress and the Civil War
In his 1998 review of Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (by Eric T. Dean, Jr.), James M. McPherson declared that the work “breaks new ground in its analysis of the psychiatric casualties of battle.” Yet since the book’s publishing it has been vastly overlooked by social historians. When researching Civil War historiography one rarely finds Shook Over Hell mentioned when assessing the soldier. Though McPherson…
Read more...“Soldiers Heart” How the Civil War Impacted Soldiers During & After
PART I During and after the Civil War surgeons began looking closely at a medical condition that affected some soldiers; what we today know as PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). It was sometimes first referred to as “melancholy” or “nostalgia” during the war. Then when surgeon Jacob Mendes Da Costa observed symptoms that he classified as a heart issue, which came be to known as “Da Costa’s syndrome,” an idiom…
Read more...Who was the Common Soldier in the American Civil War?
The average soldier was a white, native-born, single, protestant, male farmer between about 18 and 38 years of age. He stood about 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed about 145 pounds. The tallest recorded being Captain David Van Buskirk (pictured right) of the 27th Indiana Infantry who stood 6’10” and 1/2 inches tall. Union soldiers were known as “Billy Yank” while their Confederate counterparts were called “Johnny Reb.” The…
Read more...Book Review: The 14th Brooklyn Regiment in the Civil War
The 14th Brooklyn Regiment in the Civil War A History and Roster BY: Frank Callenda Regimental histories written today are a labor of love. A thankless task and one that does not pay well — you will never recoup the worth of time and money spent in monetary terms. But once again, that is not why we write them. With that said, Callenda clearly wrote about a group of men…
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