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l82CIVIL WAR HISTORY Although Rowan translated only roughly one-halfofBoernstein's two-volume autobiography, he provides good summaries at the beginning and end, enabling the reader to have a sufficient contextual understanding of Boernstein's American sojourn. While the narrative covers only seventeen years, these years were densely packed, and the result is a hefty volume of closely printed type. Boernstein's densely active life, however, does not make for dense reading, and Memoirs of a Nobody can be read as much for pleasure as education. Kenneth H. Winn Missouri State Archives The Children 's Civil War. By James Marten. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xi, 365. $34.95.) This survey of children's experiences on the home front during the Civil War is an important contribution to the growing literature on civilian life, North and South. Focusing on the most vulnerable residents of the divided nation, Marten successfully argues that children became politicized during the conflict and that throughout their lives they continued to try to come to terms with the war. While Peter Bardaglio and Wilma King have recently considered the experiences of young slaves during the war, Marten has published the first comprehensive account of Civil War children. It is a particularly challenging subject because few children recorded their reactions to the war while it raged. To supplement the small number of firsthand accounts, Marten draws heavily on memoirs , interviews with former slaves, and wartime literature written for children. In his most innovative use of sources, he examines the toys, games, and other diversions produced for children during the war. Throughout, Marten tapsAmerican and international studies ofthe psychological effects ofwarfare on twentiethcentury children to suggest how the Civil War may have affected young people during the 1860s. Marten's detailed discussion of children as the war's most innocent victims and its youngest agents begins with an analysis of the rhetoric associated with children in both the Union and the Confederacy. Children were presented as figures of inspiration for the soldiers and as symbols of the war's heavy toll on families. Marten then looks closely at the messages directed at children in books and magazines written for their consumption. While far more plentiful in the North than in the South, publications in both regions encouraged children to support the war effort. Similar words of patriotic enthusiasm filled the letters sent to children by fathers and brothers who were serving at the front. Absent fathers sought to maintain their paternal roles and to strengthen their ties to their offspring despite separation, and Marten's chronicle of their efforts makes for evocative reading. In contrast, he touches only briefly on the influence that overburdened mothers had on their children's responses to the war and, regrettably , neglects to address the role of mothers in shaping their children's politicization. BOOK REVIEWS183 Marten's review of adult conceptions of, and prescriptions for, wartime children sets the stage for his investigation of how children became "actors in their own right in the great national drama" (5). Because most of the fighting took place within the Confederacy, many Southern children, particularly slaves and contrabands, suffered acute deprivation and witnessed the war's stark brutality up close, while few Northern children came face to face with the cruelty of war. Marten argues that despite this difference, children in both regions became"politicians and home-front warriors" who usually remained firm in their loyalties and often displayed rabid partisanship (149). Both male and female children took on new responsibilities within their families, and many contributed publicly to the war effort by raising funds for flags, gunboats, soldiers' homes, and hospitals. In his extensive discussion of the adult lives of Civil War children, Marten explores the struggles of these home-front veterans to define the war's meaning. Although politicians, writers, memorialists, and everyday folks sought to explain the war in both regions, the conflict loomed larger in the memories of southerners than it did in the recollections of northerners. Marten is to be commended for the scope of his study. Although at times the breadth of the work diminishes its analytical force, The Children 's Civil War covers an...

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