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The John Lovejoy Murray collection of letters contains insights into the experiences of an African American soldier and his regiment during the Civil War. John Lovejoy Murray, a private in Company E, 102nd USCT, died of disease in a Charleston hospital on April 12, 1865. Through John Murray’s letters, readers can experience the war through the eyes of a literate northern Black soldier. His is the story of the soldiers who did not receive accolades for their heroic actions in battle, the ones who spent more time on picket and fatigue duty than on the front lines, the ones who died from disease more than they did of battle-related wounds. Murray’s letters are significant because they are ordinary in some respects yet extraordinary in others. Some of the activities and sentiments portrayed in the letters are hardly distinguishable from those described in letters written by White soldiers. In other ways, the letters represent a perspective distinctly from a Black soldier in the Union army. Although many of his experiences may have been typical, John Lovejoy Murray himself, a literate, freeborn, northern Black man, was atypical among Union Black soldiers.
Final Resting Places brings together some of the most important and innovative scholars of the Civil War era to reflect on what death and memorialization meant to the Civil War generation-and how those meanings still influence Americans today. In each essay, a noted historian explores a different type of gravesite-including large marble temples, unmarked graves beneath the waves, makeshift markers on battlefields, mass graves on hillsides, neat rows of military headstones, university graveyards, tombs without bodies, and small family plots. Each burial place tells a unique story of how someone lived and died; how they were mourned and remembered. Together, they help us reckon with the most t...
This first volume of "CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual picks up where its predecessor, the acclaimed biannual periodical "CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture, left off when the latter ceased publication in the mid-1990s. Formerly edited by several graduate students affiliated with the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture (primarily by current editor Ted Olson), "Cross Roads: A Southern Culture Annual will continue its original mission: to provide a forum for diverse perspectives on the South and on Southern culture through combining compelling new fiction and poetry from well-known as well as emerging Southern authors, with eloquent articles, memoirs, oral histories, and photo essays that interpret and celebrate relevant manifestations of the Southern cultural experience. "CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual will deepen readers' awareness of and connection to the South.
This collection of intimate letters reveals the remarkable radicalism—personal and political—of Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Anneke first became a well-known feminist and democrat in Prussia, earning notoriety for divorcing her first husband and fighting in the German Revolutions of 1848–1849. After moving to the United States, she became a noted proponent of woman suffrage, working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Like many other refugees of the German revolutions, Anneke was deeply involved in the Civil War. Radical Relationships focuses on the years 1859–1865, which encompassed not only the war but also Anneke’s intense romantic friendship with Yankee abolitionist...
This volume reveals how an ordinary American couple, Cimbaline and Henry Fike, wrote their way through struggles that challenged the survival of both their nation and marriage. Drawing on hundreds of letters exchanged between 1862 and 1865, A Union Tested details the lives of an Illinois homemaker and a quartermaster in the Union army and reveals how Civil War correspondence sustained relationships disrupted by war. In his research Jeremy Neely found that such letters became an epistolary bridge that sustained families—wives and husbands, parents and children, brothers and sisters—across the years and miles that stretched between them during the tumult of war. The Fikes’ years-long correspondence shows how a fully formed marriage reconstituted itself within the handwritten lines the couple cast across hundreds of miles. Amid the extraordinary circumstances of wartime, writing to one another prompted a remarkable degree of self-reflection and provided for each the space to learn anew about their partners, their country, and themselves.
Heartsick and Astonished features twenty-seven divorce cases from mid-nineteenth century America. More than dry legal documents, these cases provide a captivating window into marital life—and strife—in the border South during the tumultuous years before, during, and after the Civil War. Allison Dorothy Fredette has brought these primary documents to light, revealing the inner thoughts, legal hardships, and day-to-day struggles of these average citizens. In Wheeling, West Virginia, the seat of Ohio County, courtrooms bore witness to men and women from various ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds who shared shockingly intimate details of their lives and relationships. Some tried desperate...
This richly illustrated collection of fourteen essays examines the ways in which Confederate memorials - from Monument Avenue to Stone Mountain - and the public rituals surrounding them testify to the tenets of the Lost Cause, a romanticized narrative of the war. Several essays highlight the creative leading role played by women's groups in memorialization, while others explore the alternative ways in which people outside white southern culture wrote their very different histories on the southern landscape. The authors - who include Richard Guy Wilson, Catherine W. Bishir, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and William M.S. Ramussen - trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederat...