Sing Not War

After the Civil War, white Confederate and Union army veterans reentered--or struggled to reenter--the lives and communities they had left behind. In Sing Not War, James Marten explores how the nineteenth century's "Greatest Generation" attempted to blend back into society and how their experiences were treated by nonveterans. Many soldiers, Marten reveals, had a much harder time reintegrating into their communities and returning to their civilian lives than has been previously understood. Although Civil War veterans were generally well taken care of during the Gilded Age, Marten argues that veterans lost control of their legacies, becoming best remembered as others wanted to remember them--for their service in the war and their postwar political activities. Marten finds that while southern veterans were venerated for their service to the Confederacy, Union veterans often encountered resentment and even outright hostility as they aged and made greater demands on the public purse. Drawing on letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, newspapers, and other sources, Sing Not War illustrates that during the Gilded Age "veteran" conjured up several conflicting images and invoked contradicting reactions. Deeply researched and vividly narrated, Marten's book counters the romanticized vision of the lives of Civil War veterans, bringing forth new information about how white veterans were treated and how they lived out their lives.

The Homeland actress’s “recollections of her unconventional youth in war-torn Beirut are heartbreaking yet humorous . . . in this unique” memoir (Publishers Weekly). Raised in 1970s Lebanon on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. She spent her adolescence defying death in Beirut nightclubs as bombs fell across the city. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment directed at her daily by the same men who would spend the night with her. As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father’s last wish is for his favorite song, “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral instead of the traditional suras of the Koran. When she does just that, the final act of defiance elicits a catastrophic response from her surviving family members. In this dramatic true story, Darina Al-Joundi is defiantly passionate about living her life as a liberated woman, even if it means leaving everyone and everything behind in this “beautifully taut and relentlessly unemotional” memoir (Kirkus).

Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation

Mustering In -- The Jewish Recruit -- In the Company of Jews -- Fighting Together -- Sacred Duties -- Lost and Found.

Although the Civil War and the Great War were fought only fifty years apart, the perceived time between these two cataclysmic events seems far longer in popular American memory: the Civil War was the centerpiece of the nineteenth century and lies deep in America’s past whereas World War I was a modern prelude to World War II, a conflict still in living memory. Wars Civil and Great breaks down these barriers of time and memory and shows how close and how similar these two conflicts really were in the American experience. Setting both wars in the long nineteenth century, the authors of this volume reveal how the Civil War cast its long shadow over the events of the Great War. President Wilson looked to Lincoln during the Great War for guidance on national leadership at wartime; General John J. Pershing remembered the Civil War of his childhood and sought to learn lessons from Grant and McClellan; and the doughboys on European battlefields held firm to the culture of honor and duty that had inspired their forefathers to take up arms. In this volume, every author as an expert in their own field addresses four overarching questions: What legacy did the Civil War leave? Did the Great War generation interpret the lessons of the Civil War, and if so, how? How did the Great War change the lessons from the Civil War era? And finally, how did both wars contribute to the modernization of the United States? Wars Civil and Great highlights the striking similarities between the two wars by analyzing how the Civil War affected the American reaction to and experience in the Great War while attending to enlisted men, military officers, and political leaders. Other chapters address the environmental effects of both wars, the wars’ impacts on medicine and mental trauma, and the experiences of Black American soldiers in both wars as they fought for a country that treated them so terribly. This volume, while at first appearing as a disparate pairing of conflicts, deftly opens a new window into the past and establishes an illuminating paradigm in the two wars of the long nineteenth century.

In 1864, Union soldier Charles George described a charge into battle by General Phil Sheridan: "Such a picture of earnestness and determination I never saw as he showed as he came in sight of the battle field . . . What a scene for a painter!" These words proved prophetic, as Sheridan’s desperate ride provided the subject for numerous paintings and etchings as well as songs and poetry. George was not alone in thinking of art in the midst of combat; the significance of the issues under contention, the brutal intensity of the fighting, and the staggering number of casualties combined to form a tragedy so profound that some could not help but view it through an aesthetic lens, to see the war as a concert of death. It is hardly surprising that art influenced the perception and interpretation of the war given the intrinsic role that the arts played in the lives of antebellum Americans. Nor is it surprising that literature, music, and the visual arts were permanently altered by such an emotional and material catastrophe. In The Arts and Culture of the American Civil War, an interdisciplinary team of scholars explores the way the arts – theatre, music, fiction, poetry, painting, architecture, and dance – were influenced by the war as well as the unique ways that art functioned during and immediately following the war. Included are discussions of familiar topics (such as Ambrose Bierce, Peter Rothermel, and minstrelsy) with less-studied subjects (soldiers and dance, epistolary songs). The collection as a whole sheds light on the role of race, class, and gender in the production and consumption of the arts for soldiers and civilians at this time; it also draws attention to the ways that art shaped – and was shaped by – veterans long after the war.

What was it really like living as a woman in rural Ohio before, during, and after the Civil War? Beckley's grandfather's grandfather was the son of an unpretentious woman who did just that. Unknowingly, she became a family matriarch; and through the use of family documents handed down over the generations, along with governmental archives, and courthouse documents, Beckley is able to reconstruct her life. His research leads him to overgrown vacant lots, dilapidated cemeteries, and down many dusty gravel roads between Ohio and Kentucky, where on the 156th anniversary of the Perrysville Battle, he lies on the ridge where his distant ancestor's brother dies in combat. No effort is spared to reveal the emotion, life, and times of this woman who is long forgotten and yet one who should be forever remembered, thanked, and loved for her devotion to her family.