Civil War Stories

A new generation of historians are rewriting the cultural history of the Civil War. More than two decades have passed since Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (1962), George Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War (1965), and Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten War (1973) examined the intellectual and literary impact of the war. In that time, waves of books have refashioned our understanding of the military, political, and social history of the Civil War. If the cultural history of the war once lagged behind, it does not any longer. Works by Randall Jimerson, Phillip Paludan, George Rable, and Timothy Sweet, to name a few, have opened new lines of inquiry into popular attitudes, gender roles, and narrative formulations during the war.' Both Anne Rose and Kathleen Diffley build upon the illuminating works that have preceeded them and point historians in new directions. Anne Rose's closely argued book examines the connections between American Victorianism and the Civil War. In chapters on religion, work, leisure, family, and politics, she disentangles the constituent paits of Victorianism and then reconnects them. This is no work of intellectual abstraction where ideas are disembodied entities. Rather, Rose draws upon the experiences of seventy-five men and women who were born between 1815 and 1837. This sample of Victorians allows Rose to focus on the individual while simultaneously establishing claims that apply more broadly. The result is a sophisticated inquiry into the meaning and power of Victorian culture in the middle of the nineteenth century. Rose's depiction of Victorian culture will not surprise anyone, but not since Daniel Walker Howe's landmark essay on the subject has a historian written with such authority and nuance about the dynamic underpinnings of the

Political science · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society