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 Women In The Civil War  |
More than sixty women who fought or who served the Union or Confederacy in other important ways are featured in this work. Among those included are Sarah Thompson, the Union spy and nurse who brought down the famous raider John Hunt Morgan; Elizabeth Van Lew, the Union spy who was instrumental in the success of the largest prison break of the Civil War; Sarah Malinda Blalock, who fought for the Confederacy as a soldier and then for the Union as a guerrilla raider; Dr. Mary Walker, a doctor for the Union and the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for her service during the Civil War; and Jennie Hodgers, who had the longest length of service for any woman soldier, was the only woman to receive a soldier's pension and the first woman to vote in Illinois. | Although the significant involvement of American women in the reform movements that swept the nation prior to the Civil War and afterward has often been noted in historical studies, women's wartime activity has tended to be ignored. Giesberg (history, Northern Arizona Univ.), the author of several articles on women and the war, presents a study designed to correct this picture. By examining gender differences in the leadership of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, she shows that women thought and acted independently in this highly developed female-driven system of soldier supply and that this activity prepared them for postwar, women-led reform work. Libraries that own Jeanie Attie's Patriotic Toil (Cornell Univ., 1998) and other studies of women's work within this organization may still wish to acquire this book, which offers not only a comprehensive view of female wartime activity but also establishes a link between their prewar and postwar political action. |
| Robert Hansen turns her attention to the Civil War, yielding this excellent biography of Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow (1817–1864). Born into a Maryland farming family impoverished when her father was killed by one of his slaves, Rose grew up as one of the belles of Washington, D.C. Even after marrying the quiet, scholarly Robert Greenhow, she continued to play an active role in pro-Southern Washington, including nursing John C. Calhoun on his deathbed. The Greenhows traveled to California hoping to profit from the Gold Rush. After Robert's accidental death in San Francisco, Rose returned to Washington and became a prominent hostess and what would now be called a lobbyist, with many political contacts. She turned these into an espionage ring in time to provide intelligence to the Confederates for the Battle of Bull Run and continued her work until she was placed under house arrest, then confined in the Old Capitol Prison. | Gansler chronicles the intriguing life and times of a woman who served as a man during the Civil War. Fleeing from home at age 17 to escape an abusive father and avoid an unwanted marriage, Sarah Edmonds lived as a man for two years before she heeded Lincoln's call for more troops and enlisted in the Second Michigan Infantry. Performing her duties with distinction, she won the respect and admiration of the men she served alongside, even after they discovered, many years later, her astounding secret. Resuming her female identity and marrying after the war, she lived a relatively tranquil life until she decided to seek a military pension 20 years later. Enthusiastically supported by her former comrades-in-arms, she became the only woman to secure a soldier's pension for her Civil War service. |
| When Mary Livermore died in 1905 at age 84, a Boston newspaper praised her as "America's foremost woman." A leading figure in the struggle for woman's rights as well as in the temperance movement, she was as widely recognized during her lifetime as Susan B. Anthony, and for a time the most popular and highly paid female orator in the country. Yet aside from Civil War historians familiar with her service as a wartime nurse, few today remember even her name.
In this book, Wendy Hamand Venet reconstructs Mary Livermore's remarkable story and explores how and why she became so renowned in her day. Born and raised in Boston, Livermore left home at age eighteen to become the private schoolteacher to a wealthy tobacco planter's children in Virginia, an experience that afforded her an intimate look at slave-based society in the 1840s. Returning to New England, she married and lived a conventional life as the wife of a minister and mother of three daughters. With the coming of the Civil War, however, Livermore's life changed dramatically when she became active with the United States Sanitary Commission, an organization that would propel her into the public limelight and cause her to challenge society's traditional view of the role of women. |
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From the Pen of a She-Rebel: The Civil War Diary of Emilie Riley McKinley The Civil War Diary Of Emilie Riley McKinly is the fascinating and informative story of Ms. McKinly, told in her own words, as she and her rural Southern neighbors witnessed the depredations of the Civil War. What made Ms. McKinly unique was that she was a Yankee by background, yet she personally embodied deep sympathy for her Confederate neighbors. |
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Send 'Em South is an adventure story that brings the two conflicting worlds of North and South together. In the years just prior to the Civil War, David Adams grows up in the middle of two worlds. His father is an Irish immigrant who is ridiculed and ignored by the people of Boston. His mother is an abolitionist who has dedicated her life to ending slavery. David, as the son of these two, finds himself an outcast amongst his friends and even his family. |
The second in Alan N. Kay's Young Heroes of History series, On the Trail of John Brown's Body, is every bit as good as the first. Whereas that book juxtaposed the plight of a slave family and a northern family filled with abolitionists and sympathetics, this book follows the adventures of two boys and their fathers as they journey to the Kansas Territory in the days when John Brown cast the longest shadow in the land. |
Disgusted by the violence of the John Brown raid, George Adams adopts the state of Virginia and its cause as his own. The war does not go well for the South, and when the North's cannons destroy the city, George is horrified. Then, when he finds a poor starving girl, George realizes that he is the only one that can save her. Off to Fight is a story of growing up. It is a story of the brutality of war and the kindness that takes place in the middle of such horrors. |
During the Civil War, Mary Adams wants to do more than work at the aid society so she sets out for the front lines, where she cleans the wounds of Lynn Rhodes and then conceals the fact that Lynn is female. When the secret is revealed, the teens must reevaluate their roles and determine how best they can help as women in a man's world. Mention of historical figures and places allows readers to learn facts in an easy-to-read format. A bibliography and historical photographs are included. |
| The Confederate Housewife: Receipts & Remedies, Together with Sundry Suggestions for Garden, Farm, & Plantation Combination cookbook and "how-to-do-it" guide, this receipt book provides for the first time a comprehensive, grass roots picture of what many Confederate housewives faces during those tumultuous years. Substitutes abound, as do ways to preserve food, care for crops and animals, make straw hats and squirrel-skin shoes, and cure everything from cancer to small pox to ingrown toenails. Half of the nearly six hundred entries here -- all published in journals or newspapers during the Civil War -- relate to the preparation and cooking of food and encompass both substitutes and standard fare, everything from snow corn cakes and cracker pie to walnut catsup and secession rice bread. Also included is advice on measuring land, estimating hay, and collecting opium for home use. "Some of these recipes may seem strange by today's standards others horrific (cures for cancer that use turkey figs, sheep sorrel, and dock root). Still others are helpful even today." |
To 'Joy My Freedom is a fascinating look at the long-neglected story of black women in postwar southern culture. Hunter examines the strategies these women (98 percent of whom worked as domestic servants) used to cope with low wages and poor working conditions and their efforts to master the tools of advancement, including literacy. Hunter explores not only the political, but the cultural, too, offering an in-depth look at the distinctive music, dance, and theater that grew out of the black experience in the South. |
| Mothers of Invention : Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War In the ante-bellum South, women from elite slaveholding families were raised to consider themselves not so much as "women" but as "ladies," models of dependent femininity. But that ideal was to prove impossible to maintain during the social upheaval of the Civil War, when they found themselves suddenly assuming unaccustomed roles as workers, protectors, and providers. Through the use of hundreds of moving and eloquent letters, memoirs, and diary excerpts, Drew Gilpin Faust, one of the foremost historians of the American South, illuminates the lives of a wide array of Confederate women: from Lizzie Neblett, a housewife facing a life of physical labor for the first time, to Sallie Tompkins, a Virginia aristocrat turned military nurse, to Belle Boyd, a ruthless teenaged spy. |
| An international bestseller that sold more than 300,000 copies when it first appeared in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was dismissed by some as abolitionist propaganda; yet Tolstoy deemed it a great work of literature "flowing from love of God and man." Today, however, Harriet Beecher Stowe's stirring indictment of slavery is often confused with garish dramatizations that flourished for decades after the Civil War: productions that relied heavily on melodramatic simplifications of character totally alien to the original. Thus "Uncle Tom" has become a pejorative term for a subservient black, whereas Uncle Tom in the book is a man who, under the most inhumane of circumstances, never loses his human dignity. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the most powerful and most enduring work of art ever written about American slavery," said Alfred Kazin.
Synopsis : Eliza Harris, a slave whose child is to be sold, escapes her beloved home on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky and heads North, eludes the hired slave catchers and is aided by the underground railroad. Another slave, Uncle Tom, is sent "down the river" for sale and ultimately endures a martyr's death under the whips of Simon Legree's overseers. Originally published in 1852, this is a classic must-read in American Literature. |
 Above a Common Soldier by: Charles Francis Clarke Darlis A. Miller Frank and Mary Clarke in the American West and Civil War |
First published as TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION in 1941, this rare volume of Civil War-era letters relates the poignant experiences of an English immigrant in the service of the United States Army. After Frank Clarke's tragic death in 1862, his wife Mary corresponded with his English mother, detailing the daily struggles of a military widow and her five sons in frontier Kansas. 12 halftones . |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe by: Suzanne M. Coil Impact Books Impact Biographies |
Grades 7-12. Coil's admiring biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe creates a portrait of the celebrated author as a dutiful daughter; a committed abolitionist; a loving wife devoted to an often brilliant but ineffectual husband. The biography will be a useful addition to any collection, but it will be particularly helpful to students needing information about the years leading up to the Civil War, the work of the abolitionists, and the novel that "moved the world." |
Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 Brokenburn was a large plantation containing over 150 slaves in Madison Parish, Louisiana. From 1862 on, it was in the center of the Union Army's fierce assault to gain control of the Mississippi River and divide the Confederacy in half. Plantations were commandeered and slaves were encouraged to revolt. The civilian population was helpless before the demands of military control. Madison Parish had a population of approximately 9,000 of whom 7,000 were slaves. After 1861, the Parish was emptied of able-bodied white men, most of whom had been sent to far-off Virginia and Tennessee, leaving none to protect the civilians.In 1861, Kate was 20 years old, her immediate future being beaus, courtship, and a gay social life before she settled down to become a proper southern matron. She was unsure whether this route was ideal, as she remarked, "women grew significantly uglier in wedlock and ignored and abandoned their former female friends." This comfortable world was turned upside down, never to reappear again. With great enthusiasm and some trepidation, she watched her three older brothers go off to war. Her widowed mother made it clear that 14-year-old James was now in charge of the running of the plantation and the protection of the rest of the family. |
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