Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. Northern Character

In Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai examines why college-educated New Englanders fought in the Civil War. He finds a collegiately imbued sense of character as the motivating force behind their behavior. For these men, character meant an “idealized internal standard of behavior consisting most importantly of educated, independent thought and selfless action” (2). The author reaches this conclusion after examining the letters, memoirs, and other writings of men he designates as “New Brahmins” to differentiate them from their more historically identified “Brahmin” parents. Their progenitors’ character, however, proved less selfless than selfish, as exemplified by their efforts to convince their posterity to keep out of the army and harm’s way during the Civil War. While some New Brahmins have been individually well studied, including Joshua L. Chamberlain, James A. Garfield, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Robert Gould Shaw, Wongsrichanalai notes that scholars tend to ignore this youthful elite of college-educated New Englanders as a group.

Character (mathematics) · Elite · Honor · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies