Private Confederacies

In Private Confederacies James J. Broomall explores the emotional environments that southern soldiers inhabited before, during, and after the Civil War. Exhibiting an expert familiarity with current scholarship, Broomall also make exceptionally nuanced use of the diaries, letters, and public documents that Confederates left behind, arguing eloquently for an emotional tenor that characterized the cohort from the time they entered service until their lives ended. Emotionology—the historical study of emotions—is fraught with methodological hazards, which the book first acknowledges and then deftly avoids. Class, race, and gender all impose their own criteria on behavior, and they limit the ability to understand one's own emotional state. As with the soldiers of World War I forty years later, the high level of literacy among Civil War troops meant that letters home could either discuss emotions frankly or lapse into an expected cant that constrained honest discussion. Diaries, released from the epistolary obligation to reassure distant family or friends, could contain private thoughts more readily, and Broomall is lucky to have informants whose journals speak of both the prosaic life of the soldier and the unimaginable experiences of battle

Battle · Media studies · Obligation · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society