The Divided Family in Civil War America PDF Download

Author: Amy Murrell Taylor
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807899076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The Civil War has long been described as a war pitting "brother against brother." The divided family is an enduring metaphor for the divided nation, but it also accurately reflects the reality of America's bloodiest war. Connecting the metaphor to the real experiences of families whose households were split by conflicting opinions about the war, Amy Murrell Taylor provides a social and cultural history of the divided family in Civil War America. In hundreds of border state households, brothers--and sisters--really did fight one another, while fathers and sons argued over secession and husbands and wives struggled with opposing national loyalties. Even enslaved men and women found themselves divided over how to respond to the war. Taylor studies letters, diaries, newspapers, and government documents to understand how families coped with the unprecedented intrusion of war into their private lives. Family divisions inflamed the national crisis while simultaneously embodying it on a small scale--something noticed by writers of popular fiction and political rhetoric, who drew explicit connections between the ordeal of divided families and that of the nation. Weaving together an analysis of this popular imagery with the experiences of real families, Taylor demonstrates how the effects of the Civil War went far beyond the battlefield to penetrate many facets of everyday life.

Author: David Williams
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595585958
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The little-known history of anti-secession Southerners: “Absolutely essential Civil War reading.” —Booklist, starred review Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of the South’s history, David Williams shows the powerful and little-understood impact of the thousands of draft resisters, Southern Unionists, fugitive slaves, and other Southerners who opposed the Confederate cause. “This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. . . . His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army . . . Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists . . . With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Most Southerners looked on the conflict with the North as ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,’ especially because owners of 20 or more slaves and all planters and public officials were exempt from military service . . . The Confederacy lost, it seems, because it was precisely the kind of house divided against itself that Lincoln famously said could not stand.” —Booklist, starred review

Author: William Hendon
Publisher: William S. Hendon
ISBN: 1424166772
Category : Alabama
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
In late 1863, the Hendon brothers from northern Alabama went to war. Most men around them joined the Confederate Army as did James, the oldest son of William and Sarah Hendon. James joined the 10th Alabama Infantry Regiment and fought in Leeas Army of Northern Virginia against U.S. Grantas Overland Campaign of 1864, including the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and the Bloody Angle, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and the end at Appomattox. However, for the other three brothers, the Union cavalry was their choice. Robert, Jonathan and Henry joined the 1st U.S. Alabama Cavalry Regiment and fought in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and in the battle for Atlanta under William Tecumseh Sherman. Four brothers went to war and only three came home. This book is the story of their war-time experiences and the deep divide that came to their family as a result.

Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195080343
Category : Sex role
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Divided Houses is the first book to show how the Civil War transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among Americans. This unique volume brings together a wide spectrum of critical viewpoints by newly emerging scholars as well as distinguished authors in the field to show how gender became a prism through which the political tensions of antebellum America were filtered and focused. Through the course of the book, many fascinating subjects are explored, from new "manly" responsibilities both black and white men had thrust upon them as soldiers, to women's roles in the guerrilla fighting, to the wartime dialogue on interracial sex. In addition, an incisive introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson helps place these various subjects within an overall historical context. Divided House sheds new light on the entire Civil War experience, demonstrating how themes of gender, class, race, and sexuality interacted to forge the beginnings of a new society.

Author: Amanda Peterson
Publisher: Capstone
ISBN: 1491420103
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 49

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Book Description
"The Civil War was a bloody 4-year battle. Follow the war from the first shots fired on Fort Sumter to General Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and see how America's War Between the States unfolded. Meets Common Core standards for analyzing chronology text structures. Perfect for Common Core studies on analyzing the chronology of an event"--

Author: Lisa Tendrich Frank
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356344
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
"Household War is a collection of essays that explores the Civil War through the household. According to the editors, the household served as 'the basic building block for American politics, economics, and social relations.' As such, the scholars of this volume make the case that the Civil War can be understood as a revolutionary moment in the transformation of the household order. 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. The volume offers a unique approach to the study of the Civil War that allows an inclusive examination of how the war 'flowed from, required, and . . . resulted in the restructuring of the household' between regions and those enslaved and free. This volume seeks to address how households redefined and reordered themselves as a result of the changes stemming from the Civil War. Scholars of this volume provide compelling histories of the myriad ways in which the household played a central role during an era of social upheaval and transformation"--

Author: Amy Murrell Taylor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469643634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The Civil War was just days old when the first enslaved men, women, and children began fleeing their plantations to seek refuge inside the lines of the Union army as it moved deep into the heart of the Confederacy. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more followed in a mass exodus from slavery that would destroy the system once and for all. Drawing on an extraordinary survey of slave refugee camps throughout the country, Embattled Freedom reveals as never before the everyday experiences of these refugees from slavery as they made their way through the vast landscape of army-supervised camps that emerged during the war. Amy Murrell Taylor vividly reconstructs the human world of wartime emancipation, taking readers inside military-issued tents and makeshift towns, through commissary warehouses and active combat, and into the realities of individuals and families struggling to survive physically as well as spiritually. Narrating their journeys in and out of the confines of the camps, Taylor shows in often gripping detail how the most basic necessities of life were elemental to a former slave's quest for freedom and full citizenship. The stories of individuals--storekeepers, a laundress, and a minister among them--anchor this ambitious and wide-ranging history and demonstrate with new clarity how contingent the slaves' pursuit of freedom was on the rhythms and culture of military life. Taylor brings new insight into the enormous risks taken by formerly enslaved people to find freedom in the midst of the nation's most destructive war.

Author: Maurice Isserman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195091906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A definitive account of the turbulent 1960s, "America Divided" presents the most sophisticated understanding to date of all sides of the decade's many political, social, and cultural conflicts. 45 photos.

Author: April E. Holm
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807167738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
A Kingdom Divided uncovers how evangelical Christians in the border states influenced debates about slavery, morality, and politics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Using little-studied events and surprising incidents from the region, April E. Holm argues that evangelicals on the border powerfully shaped the regional structure of American religion in the Civil War era. In the decades before the Civil War, the three largest evangelical denominations diverged sharply over the sinfulness of slavery. This division generated tremendous local conflict in the border region, where individual churches had to define themselves as being either northern or southern. In response, many border evangelicals drew upon the “doctrine of spirituality,” which dictated that churches should abstain from all political debate. Proponents of this doctrine defined slavery as a purely political issue, rather than a moral one, and the wartime arrival of secular authorities who demanded loyalty to the Union only intensified this commitment to “spirituality.” Holm contends that these churches’ insistence that politics and religion were separate spheres was instrumental in the development of the ideal of the nonpolitical southern church. After the Civil War, southern churches adopted both the disaffected churches from border states and their doctrine of spirituality, claiming it as their own and using it to supply a theological basis for remaining divided after the abolition of slavery. By the late nineteenth century, evangelicals were more sectionally divided than they had been at war’s end. In A Kingdom Divided, Holm provides the first analysis of the crucial role of churches in border states in shaping antebellum divisions in the major evangelical denominations, in navigating the relationship between church and the federal government, and in rewriting denominational histories to forestall reunion in the churches. Offering a new perspective on nineteenth-century sectionalism, it highlights how religion, morality, and politics interacted—often in unexpected ways—in a time of political crisis and war.

Author: Peter Batty
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140117165
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"The Divided Union" is an account of five of the most dramatic and tragic years in the history of the U.S. The families and neighbors of a fledgling superpower were pitted against each other in a war concerned with the most fundamental of human motivations: freedom, identity, and nation. While great leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant found their moment, millions of ordinary Americans suffered terribly and more were killed than during the First and Second World Wars combined. The victory of the North determined the indivisibility of the Union and ensured its development as a nation, yet deep scars remained, and the ideals outlined by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address failed to become a blueprint for the modern U.S. This is an accessible and compelling account both of the conflict itself and of its wider implications.