Question of the Week: 4/3-4/9/17
Last month Emerging Civil War featured a special series for Women’s History Month.
Do you have a favorite woman historian or author whose books, lectures, or projects have positively influenced your understanding of a Civil War topic?
The late Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Definitely Megan Kate Nelson, author , blogger, and historian. Her blog Historista has influenced me in many ways, especially in my attempts to make the study of the Civil War part of today’s conversations. http://www.megankatenelson.com.
Anne Marshall’s “Creating a Confederate Kentucky” has influenced me to pay more attention to non-battle aspects of the war in Kentucky, specifically memory-related subjects and I have purchased other books on similar topics because of how fascinating her work was to me.
Drew Gilpin Faust, author of “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South” (Francis Parkman Prize winner) and “This Republic of Suffering, Death and The American Civil War”. She is currently the president of Harvard University, where she holds the Lincoln Professorship in History.
Totally agree. Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” is a must read for anyone looking for deeper meaning to the effects of war on our culture.
Carol Reardon
I’ll add Chandra Manning’s “What This Cruel War Was Over”. Using a fairly extensive data base of soldier letters and regimental newspapers, her book pretty thoroughly demolishes the Lost Cause spin (still accepted by a certain crowd) that the perceived threat to slavery and white supremacy was NOT the primary motivation for Confederate soldiers – regardless of whether they actually owned slaves or not (and I note as an aside that Glathaar has made a fair case that the percentage of those whose families owned slaves was much higher than those who actually owned slaves themselves).