The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War

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Macmillan, 2007 M10 30 - 272 páginas

They are all infantrymen; none were commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is nineteen stunning watercolors that cover a year's enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six are from slave states, one of whom was a Unionist. Drawing from the more than 60,000 documents housed in the privately held Gilder Lehrman Collection, Robert E. Bonner has movingly reconstructed the experiences of sixteen Civil War soldiers, using their own accounts to knit together a ground-level view of the entire conflict. The immediacy of diaries and the intimacy of letters to loved ones accompany the humor of an anonymous cartoonist from Massachusetts, the vivid paintings of Private Henry Berckhoff.

All reproduced for the first time in The Soldier's Pen, the documents and images that Bonner weaves together, providing context and explanation as required, powerfully re-create the day-to-day lives of the soldiers who fought and died for Union and Confederacy. Not since the 2000 publication of Robert Sneden's paintings and papers in Eye of the Storm has a collection of original Civil War documents so evocatively captured the war.

 

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Contenido

Glimpses of Many Things Untold
3
The Tender Lines of War
15
Army Life and the Comforts of Home
49
Combat Bloodshed and the Traces of Battle
79
The Union Divided?
113
The Fading Gray
149
Bonds Broken Bonds Bestored
189
Relies of War
223
Index of Source Material from the Gilder Lehrman Collection
237
Acknowledgments
247
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Acerca del autor (2007)

Assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, Robert E. Bonner is the author of two previous books on the Civil War. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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