Home Front In The American Heartland

This collection offers a multifaceted exploration of World War One and its aftermath in the northern American Heartland, a region often overlooked in wartime histories. The chapters feature archival and newspaper documentation and visual imagery from this era. The first section, “Heartland Histories,” explores experiences of conscription and home front mobilization in the small communities of the heartland, highlighting tensions associated with patriotism, class, ethnicities, and locale. In one chapter, the previously unpublished cartoon art of a USAF POW displays his Midwestern sensibilities. Section Two, “Homefront Propaganda,” examines the cultural networks disseminating national war messages, notably the critical work of local theaters, Four Minute Men, the Allied War Exhibitions, and the local commemorative displays of military relics. Section Three, “Gender in/and War,” highlights aspects often over-shadowed by male experiences of the war itself, including the patriotic mother, androgynous representations in wartime propaganda, and masculine violence following the war. Together, this volume provides rich portraits of the complexities of heartland home front experiences and legacies.

The Civil War has historically been viewed somewhat simplistically as a battle between the North and the South. Southern historians have broadened this viewpoint by revealing the “many Souths” that made up the Confederacy, but the “North” has remained largely undifferentiated as a geopolitical term. In this welcome collection, seven Civil War scholars offer a unique regional perspective on the Civil War by examining how a specific group of Northerners—Midwesterners, known as Westerners and Middle Westerners during the 1860s—experienced the war on the home front. Much of the intensifying political and ideological turmoil of the 1850s played out in the Midwest and instilled in its people a powerful sense of connection to this important drama. The 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Law and highly visible efforts to recapture former bondsmen and women who had escaped; underground railroad “stations” and supporters throughout the region; publication of Ohioan Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely-influential and best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; the murderous abolitionist John Brown, who gained notoriety and hero status attacking proslavery advocates in Kansas; the emergence of the Republican Party and Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln—all placed the Midwest at the center of the rising sectional tensions. From the exploitation of Confederate prisoners in Ohio to wartime college enrollment in Michigan, these essays reveal how Midwestern men, women, families, and communities became engaged in myriad war-related activities and support. Agriculture figures prominently in the collection, with several scholars examining the agricultural power of the region and the impact of the war on farming, farm families, and farm women. Contributors also consider student debates and reactions to questions of patriotism, the effect of the war on military families’ relationships, issues of women’s loyalty and deference to male authority, as well as the treatment of political dissent and dissenters. Bringing together an assortment of home front topics from a variety of fresh perspectives, this collection offers a view of the Civil War that is unabashedly Midwestern.

When crisis requires U.S troops to deploy on American soil, the nation depends on a rich body of law to establish lines of authority, guard civil liberties, and protect democratic institutions. William Banks and Stephen Dycus analyze the military’s domestic role as it is shaped by law, and ask what we must learn and do before the next crisis.

With a new preface and updated historiographical essay. Based on recent scholarship and deep research in primary sources, especially the letters and diaries of “ordinary people,” The Northern Home Front during the Civil War is the first full narrative history and analysis of the northern home front in almost a quarter-century. It examines the mobilization, recruitment, management, politics, costs, and experience of war from the perspective of the home front, with special attention to the ways the war affected the ideas, identities, interests, and issues shaping people’s lives, and vice versa. The book looks closely at people’s responses to war’s demands, whether in supporting the Union cause or opposing it, and it measures the ways the war transformed society and economy or simply reconfirmed ideas and reinforced practices already underway. As The Northern Home Front during the Civil War reveals, issues and concerns of emancipation, conscription, civil liberties, economic policies and practices, religion, party politics, war management, popular culture, and work were all part of what Lincoln rightly termed “a People’s Contest” and as much as the armies in the field determined the outcome of the nation’s ordeal by fire. As The Northern Home Front during the Civil War shows, understanding the experience of the women and men on the home front is essential to realizing Walt Whitman’s oft-quoted call to get “the real war” into the books.

Wars are fought on the home front as well as the battlefront. Spouses, family, friends, and communities are called upon to sacrifice and persevere in the face of a changed reality. Hoosiers on the Home Front explores the lives and experiences of ordinary Hoosiers from around Indiana who were left to fight at home during wartimes. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Indiana Magazine of History, a journal of state and midwestern history published since 1905, this collection includes original diaries, letters and memoirs, and research essays—all focused on Hoosiers on the home front of the Civil War through the Vietnam War. Readers will meet, among others, Joshua Jones of the 19th Indiana Volunteer Regiment and his wife, Celia; Attia Porter, a young resident of Corydon, Indiana, writing to her cousin about Morgan's Raid; Civil War and World War I veterans who came into conflict over the Indianapolis 500 and Memorial Day observances; Virginia Mayberry, a wife and mother on the World War II home front; and university students and professors—including antiwar activist Howard Zinn and conservative writer R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.—clashing over the Vietnam War. Hoosiers on the Home Front offers a compelling glimpse of how war impacts everyone, even those who never saw the front line.

When will the war finally come to an end? Home Front: Viet Nam and Families at War recounts the private ordeals of several families who bore the brunt of Americas war in Viet Nam. Their experiences, an ongoing tragedy since the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnamese soil, reveal the physical and psychological wounds of war wounds that dont discriminate between soldier and family. From the backwoods of Maine to the rugged wide open landscape of Montana, we meet a dozen soldiers and their families and hear their stories. Author Willard D. Gray knows the fallout firsthand. His oldest son spent two years and eighteen consecutive days in Viet Nam as a BAMC trained medic, most of his tour served in the bush or in the grist mill of an evac. hospital. When Willards son returned home in April 1970 without an honorable discharge, the Gray family endured several months of tension, anger, and disappointment. Tommy Gray had come home a completely changed young man. Exhaustive efforts by his family to upgrade his discharge status and remove the stigma placed upon him and those closest to him ultimately failed to reunite the family. But Willards crusade on behalf of his son soon grew to include others in the community who had also been traumatized and marginalized by the war. A national tragedy became a personal quest. Others who had been left to their own devices after the war, with no help from the government or their local communities, surely needed support.

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II. In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

The work folklorists do on the ground and in communities can make a concrete difference in quality of life. While the field is not immune to extractive, racist, colonial, heteronormative, and misogynistic practices, it can counter and combat these same forces in society. Culture Work presents case studies of public-oriented work that define the Wisconsin Idea of folklore in all its complexities, challenges, and potentialities. Thematically arranged chapters represent interconnected aspects of culture work, from amplifying local voices to galvanizing community from within to reflecting on how we might use folklore to build the world we want to live in.