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The Journal of Military History 67.4 (2003) 1295-1296



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Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front. By James Marten. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2003. ISBN 1-57607-237-1. Photographs. Illustrations. Bibliographical essay. Index. Pp. xiii, 346. $85.00.

James Marten, professor of history at Marquette University, is best known for his prize-winning book, The Children's Civil War (1998), a superb study of the impact of the war on the lives of the United States's younger inhabitants. In Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front, he applies a similar skilful touch to a broader range of topics dealing with the civilian side of the conflict. The resulting book is neither a traditional narrative nor an all-encompassing survey of home-front events. Rather, it is a series of well-written, interesting case studies that focus on the lives of individuals North and South. Taken together, they successfully fulfill Marten's stated purpose of using personal stories to illustrate how the war seeped into all aspects of American life, changing much in the process. By focusing on individuals and the unique sources they left behind, he allows nineteenth-century Americans to shape their stories without abdicating the historian's responsibility to guide the narrative and draw conclusions.

Marten groups his stories into five sections dealing with the southern home front, the northern home front, children, African Americans, and the war's aftermath. Some of the stories included in these broad categories—Edmund Ruffin as the unrepentant Confederate and Booker T. Washington's rise up from slavery—will be familiar to historians. Nevertheless, the author [End Page 1295] does an excellent job of finding lesser-known subjects to help make his points. Biographical stories about northern and southern dissenters, women under siege at Vicksburg, soldiers and their children, war orphans, and the veterans who lived out their days in soldiers' homes are just a few of the war's uncommon stories that Marten shares with his readers. The breakdown of southern white control over slaves and the centralization of northern charitable endeavors also provide especially good examples of Marten's effort to show how battles reached far beyond armies to reshape life behind the lines.

Some readers may quibble with the weight Marten gives to some of the broader themes at the expense of others. For example, he gives more space to children than he gives to African Americans. One could also make a case that while he does devote time to postwar issues such as the relationship of Confederate women to the South's Lost Cause ideology and the education of freedpeople, he fails to spend sufficient time on the process of Reconstruction, thus reinforcing the notion that the war and its immediate aftermath were disconnected in some way by the Confederate surrender. Regardless, the author had to make choices and the final product suggests he did so in a thoughtful way.

Civil War America provides teachers with good starting point for freshening up their views on the war and non-historians with a fine survey of the non-military issues that now concern scholars. It also gives instructors an excellent tool for directing their high school and college students to lesser known aspects of the war that might act as a hook for drawing them into the larger process of doing history. Its short but current bibliographies will guide all readers to more information in both primary and secondary sources. One only hopes that eventually an affordable paperback edition will give this book the circulation that it deserves.



Paul A. Cimbala
Fordham Univesity
The Bronx, New York

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