Everyday Life The Civil War

From soldiers and statesmen to farmers and firing lines, Everyday Life During the Civil War offers an in-depth exploration of this fascinating era. Using dozens of illustrations, timelines, and maps, Varhola illuminates the details of both Northern and Southern life.

Eleven fascinating historical articles (four or five pages long, and reproducible so teachers can hand them out to students) summarize main points and deliver colorful, memorable details about "everyday life" during the Civil War. Following each illustrated article, three or four reproducible worksheets test comprehension and spark deeper engagement through creative writing, arts and crafts projects, research starters, critical thought questions, what-if scenarios, and other activities. Topics include background and causes, advantages of each side, first battles, the leaders, the soldiers life, the home fronts, innovations, unusual facts (youthful, foreign, and female soldiers), African Americans, hospitals and prisons, and the aftermath. Grades 4-8. Suggested readings. Answer keys.

Offers opposing viewpoints on issues associated with the Civil War including secession, slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the President's right to suspend civil liberties.

Based on extensive research into newly discovered documents, this new edition of the popular volume offers an updated look at the daily lives of ordinary citizens caught up in the Civil War. When first published, Daily Life in Civil War America shifted the spotlight from the conflict's military operations and famous leaders to its affect on day-to-day living. Now this popular, groundbreaking work returns in a thoroughly updated new edition, drawing on an expanded range of journals, journalism, diaries, and correspondence to capture the realities of wartime life for soldiers and citizens, slaves and free persons, women and children, on both sides of the conflict. In addition to chapter-by-chapter updating, the edition features new chapters on two important topics: the affects of the war on families, focusing on the absence of men on the home front and the plight of nearly 26,000 children orphaned by the war; and the activities of the Copperheads, anti-Confederate border residents, and other Southern pacifist groups.

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.

Based on ethnographic research, this book provides insights on the Maoist insurgency from 1996 to 2006, the impact of the war on every day life in the villages and the effect the conflict had on the area even after the war ended.