How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael’s sweeping study of men at war. Digging deeply into soldier letters, Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought, but rather on how they thought. He resists the idea that there was “a common” experience but looks into their own words to find shared threads in soldiers’ experiences.
Keywords: Civil War, Civil War soldiers, military history, sentimentalism, gender, emotional history, material culture, sensory history, battlefield trauma, military discipline, military tactics
Print publication date: 2018 | Print ISBN-13: 9781469643090 |
Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: January 2020 | DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643090.001.0001 |