The Divided Family in Civil War America | 
 enlarge | Author: Amy Murrell Taylor
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 858818
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0807829692
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.71
EAN: 9780807829691
ASIN: 0807829692
Publication Date: October 24, 2005
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Product Description
The Civil War has long been described as a war pitting "brother against brother." The divided family is an enduring metaphor for the divided nation, but it also accurately reflects the reality of America's bloodiest war. Connecting the metaphor to the real experiences of families whose households were split by conflicting opinions about the war, Amy Murrell Taylor provides a social and cultural history of the divided family in Civil War America. In hundreds of border state households, brothers--and sisters--really did fight one another, while fathers and sons argued over secession and husbands and wives struggled with opposing national loyalties. Even enslaved men and women found themselves divided over how to respond to the war. Taylor studies letters, diaries, newspapers, and government documents to understand how families coped with the unprecedented intrusion of war into their private lives. Family divisions inflamed the national crisis while simultaneously embodying it on a small scale--something noticed by writers of popular fiction and political rhetoric, who drew explicit connections between the ordeal of divided families and that of the nation. Weaving together an analysis of this popular imagery with the experiences of real families, Taylor demonstrates how the effects of the Civil War went far beyond the battlefield to penetrate many facets of everyday life.
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| Customer Reviews:
An Impressive Work, As Much Literature as History May 31, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I am extremely impressed with Taylor's book, which explores the real and imagined consequences of the Civil War on families in border states, where the question of secession was the most complicated and the most fraught. This book not only documents (in writing that rises to the level of great literary writing -- a rarity in young historians) the actual occurrence of split families and what they had to say for themselves, but also the psychological, moral, and political implications of families at odds with each other. That is, this book gets beyond the idea of "the brother's war" as merely a curiosity or a sentimental metaphor, and shows how the state of the society -- the relations between men and women, white and black -- itself is revealed in the experience of these families, observed in extremis.
The writing, again, is extraordinary. Fans of Doris Kearn Goodwin or David McCullough will love this book, and will be pleased to know that Taylor is of the new generation of historians and likely to be around and writing for a very long time.
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