The Home Front In The North

This book comprehensively covers the wide geographical range of the northern home fronts during the Civil War, emphasizing the diverse ways people interpreted, responded to, and adapted to war by their ideas, interests, and actions. The Northern Home Front during the Civil War provides the first extensive treatment of the northern home front mobilizing for war in two decades. It collates a vast and growing scholarship on the many aspects of a citizenship organizing for and against war. The text focuses attention on the roles of women, blacks, immigrants, and other individuals who typically fall outside of scrutiny in studies of American war-making society, and provides new information on subjects such as raising money for war, civil liberties in wartime, the role of returning soldiers in society, religion, relief work, popular culture, and building support for the cause of the Union and freedom. Organized topically, the book covers the geographic breadth of the diverse northern home fronts during the Civil War. The chapters supply self-contained studies of specific aspects of life, work, relief, home life, religion, and political affairs, to name only a few. This clearly written and immensely readable book reveals the key moments and gradual developments over time that influenced northerners' understanding of, participation in, and reactions to the costs and promise of a great civil war.

At the outset of World War II, North Carolina was one of the poorest states in the Union. More than half of the land was rural. Over one-third of the farms had no electricity; only one in eight had a telephone. Illiteracy and a lack of education resulted in the highest rate of draft rejections of any state. The citizens desperately wanted higher living standards, and the war would soon awaken the Rip Van Winkle state to its fullest potential. Home Front traces the evolution of the people, customs, traditions, and attitudes, arguing that World War II was the most significant event in the history of modern North Carolina. Using oral history interviews, newspaper accounts, and other primary sources, historian Julian Pleasants explores the triumphs, hardships, and emotions of North Carolinians during this critical period. The Training and Selective Service Act of 1940 created over fifty new military bases in the state to train two million troops. Citizens witnessed German submarines sinking merchant vessels off the coast, struggled to understand and cope with rationing regulations, and used 10,000 German POWs as farm and factory laborers. The massive influx of newcomers reinvigorated markets--the timber, mineral, textile, tobacco, and shipbuilding industries boomed, and farmers and other manufacturing firms achieved economic success. Although racial and gender discrimination remained, World War II provided social and economic opportunities for black North Carolinians and for women to fill jobs once limited to men, helping to pave the way for the civil and women's rights movements that followed. The conclusion of World War II found North Carolina drastically different. Families had lost sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters. Despite all the sacrifices and dislocations, the once provincial state looked forward to a modern, diversified, and highly industrialized future.

Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.

Home front and battle front merged in 1865 when General William T. Sherman occupied Savannah and then marched his armies north through the Carolinas. Although much has been written about the military aspects of Sherman's March, Jacqueline Campbell reveals a more complex story. Integrating evidence from Northern soldiers and from Southern civilians, black and white, male and female, Campbell demonstrates the importance of culture for determining the limits of war and how it is fought. Sherman's March was an invasion of both geographical and psychological space. The Union army viewed the Southern landscape as military terrain. But when they brought war into Southern households, Northern soldiers were frequently astounded by the fierceness with which many white Southern women defended their homes. Campbell argues that in the household-centered South, Confederate women saw both ideological and material reasons to resist. While some Northern soldiers lauded this bravery, others regarded such behavior as inappropriate and unwomanly. Campbell also investigates the complexities behind African Americans' decisions either to stay on the plantation or to flee with Union troops. Black Southerners' delight at the coming of the army of "emancipation" often turned to terror as Yankees plundered their homes and assaulted black women. Ultimately, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea calls into question postwar rhetoric that represented the heroic defense of the South as a male prerogative and praised Confederate women for their "feminine" qualities of sentimentality, patience, and endurance. Campbell suggests that political considerations underlie this interpretation--that Yankee depredations seemed more outrageous when portrayed as an attack on defenseless women and children. Campbell convincingly restores these women to their role as vital players in the fight for a Confederate nation, as models of self-assertion rather than passive self-sacrifice.

More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, often focusing on Lincoln’s determination to save the Union, or highlighting the brutality of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet the frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battle fronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation’s consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation’s past, present, and future. A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and followed the progress of the companies and regiments that they had sent off to fight. At the same time, their soldier boys never fully severed their ties with home, even as the rigors of war made them rougher versions of their old selves. The home front and the front lines remained intimately connected. This book expands our understanding of those connections.The authors of the essays in this volume bring new and different approaches to some familiar topics while offering answers to some questions that other scholars have ignored for too long. They explore such varied experiences as recruitment, soldiers' motivation, civilian access to the combat experience, wartime correspondence, benevolence and organized relief, race relations, definitions of freedom and citizenship, and ways civilians interacted with soldiers who sojourned in their communities. It is important that they do not stop with the end of the fighting, but also explore such postwar problems as the reintegration of soldiers into northern life and the claims to public memory, including those made by African Americans. Taken as a whole, the essays in Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front provide a better understanding of the larger scope and depth of wartime events experienced by both civilians and soldiers and of the ways those events nurtured the enduring connections between those who fought and those who remained at home. In that regard, the essays go to the very heart of the Civil War experience.

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves. Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.

Greg Castillo presents an illustrated history of the persuasive impact of model homes, appliances, and furniture in Cold War propaganda.

The first history of the Soviet home front experience during World War II and of the civilians who bore the burden of total war and played a critical role in the global victory over fascism. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, German troops conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture and turned the occupied territories into mass killing fields. The country's survival hung in the balance. In Fortress Dark and Stern, Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell the epic tale of the Soviet home front during World War II. Against the backdrop of the Red Army's early retreats and hard-fought advances after Stalingrad, they present the impact of total war behind the front lines in a chronicle of spirited defense efforts, draconian state directives, teeming black markets, official corruption, and selfless heroism. In one of the greatest wartime feats in history, Soviet workers rapidly evacuated factories, food, and people thousands of miles to the east. After long and dangerous journeys in unheated boxcars, they built a new industrial base beyond the reach of German bombers. As the Soviet state reached the height of its power, imposing military discipline and sending millions of people to work thousands of miles from home, ordinary people withstood starvation, epidemics, and horrific living conditions to supply the front and make the Allied victory possible This book examines the dark and painful war years from a new perspective, telling the stories of evacuees, refugees, teenaged and women workers, runaways from work, prisoners, and deportees. Based on a vast trove of new archival materials, Fortress Dark and Stern reveals a history of suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate triumph largely unknown to Western readers.

Home Front to Battlefront contributes the rich details of one soldier's experience to the broader literature on World War II, offering insight into the wartime career of a Jewish Ohioan in the military from enlistment to training through overseas deployment via personal letters, recollections, official military history, and more.