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Civil War students will find this diary useful because it is the only fully descriptive record of a member of the Pioneer Corps, which was composed of men with construction skills. Little is known about how these units operated and what the internal organization was like.
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Adah Isaacs Menken was the most highly paid and most scandalous stage performer of the 1860s. She is also one of the most fascinating and unconventional writers in American literary history, and the first to follow the revolution in poetry started by Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This edition presents, for the first time, a generous selection of Menken's uncollected poems and essays, along with the first edition of Infelicia (1868), her only book. Also included is a range of carefully selected appendices that help contextualize Menken's writings in terms of theater, Judaism, Bohemianism, women's rights, and women writers.
Respectable and Disreputable describes how Montgomerians spent their increasing leisure time during the four decades preceding the Civil War. Everyday activities included gambling, drinking, sporting, hunting, and voluntary associations -- military, literary, self-improvement, fraternal, and civic. The book also includes seasonal activities -- religious and national holidays, fairs, balls, horse racing, and summering at mineral springs. Commercial entertainment, which became more prominent in the late antebellum period, included theater, opera, circuses, and minstrel shows. Historian Jeffrey Benton describes not only those everyday, seasonal, and commercial activities, but also shows how antebellum society debated the moral and philosophical questions of how leisure time should be spent. Woven throughout the book are comparisons between Montgomery and other cities and towns in antebellum America. Although the United States may have been increasingly divided economically, on rural-urban experiences, and of course on the issue of slavery, it seems that antebellum Americans -- at least those living in or with easy access to urban areas -- shared very similar leisure time activities.
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