The War for the Common Soldier (eBook)

How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies

Peter S. Carmichael (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
408 Seiten
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-4310-6 (ISBN)

Infos

How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war. Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.11.2018
• Reihe/Serie: Littlefield History of the Civil War Era
• Reihe/Serie: Littlefield History of the Civil War Era
• Zusatzinfo: 31 halftones, notes, bibl., index
• Verlagsort: Chapel Hill
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 160 x 160 mm
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► 20. Jahrhundert bis 1945
• Schlagworte: Battlefield morale • Civilian-Soldier relations • Civil War camp life • Civil War combat • Civil War deserters • Civil War reporting • Civil War soldier art • Civil War soldier malingering • Civil war soldiers • Coercion and discipline in Civil War armies. Professionalism in Civil War armies • Crime and punishment in Civil War armies • Cultural history of Civil War soldiers • Cultural perceptions of Confederate soldiers • Cultural perceptions of Union soldiers • Death in the Civil War • Desertion • Dissent in the ranks of Civil War armies • Emotional relationships among Civil War soldiers • Environmental Impact of the Civil War • Fraternization in Civil War armies • Gendered ideas of soldiering • Ideological convictions of • Ideological convictions of Civil War soldiers • Illiterate Civil War soldiers • Material culture of Civil War armies • Medical understanding of battlefield trauma • Military Discipline • Nationalism among Civil War soldiers • Poverty in the ranks • Pragmatism • Racial explanation of courage and cowardice • Sentimentalism • Sickness and disease in Civil War armies • Soldier writing about the Civil War • Soldier writing about violence • Spiritual confusion in the ranks • The act of Letter Writing • the economies of Civil War armies • the Intellectual history of Civil War soldiers • The nature of comradeship in Civil War armies • the religious life of Civil War soldiers • The use of irony among Civil War soldiers • United States Colored Troops • Visualizing violence from the ranks
• ISBN-10: 1-4696-4310-3 / 1469643103
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4696-4310-6 / 9781469643106