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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Enduring The Elements: Civil War Soldiers’ Struggles Against The Weather, Cameron Boutin
Enduring The Elements: Civil War Soldiers’ Struggles Against The Weather, Cameron Boutin
Theses and Dissertations--History
This dissertation is an environmental history that studies the variety of ways that soldiers in the American Civil War experienced the pressures of weather over the course of their military service. For the troops of the U.S. and Confederacy, the weather was more than simply a passive backdrop to their time in the military, but a central preoccupation. This dissertation analyzes how weather intersected with some of the most central experiences of soldiering – tent camping and winter quarters, marching, bivouacking, manning sentry posts and field fortifications, and fighting in battles. Life in Civil War armies consisted of all of …
American Mnemonic: Racial Identity In Women’S Life Writing Of The Civil War, Katherine Waddell
American Mnemonic: Racial Identity In Women’S Life Writing Of The Civil War, Katherine Waddell
Theses and Dissertations--English
American Mnemonic: Racial Identity in Women’s Life Writing of the Civil War takes up three American women's autobiographies: Emilie Davis’s pocket diaries (1863-65), Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House (1868), and Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863). Chapter one is devoted to literary review and methodology. Chapter two, "the all-absorbing topic': Belonging and Isolation in Emilie Davis’s Diaries," explores the everyday record of Emilie Davis in the context of Philadelphia’s free black community during the war. Davis’s position as a working-class free woman offers a fresh perspective on the much-discussed “elite” …
The Rhetoric Of Destruction: Racial Identity And Noncombatant Immunity In The Civil War Era, James M. Bartek
The Rhetoric Of Destruction: Racial Identity And Noncombatant Immunity In The Civil War Era, James M. Bartek
University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations
This study explores how Americans chose to conduct war in the mid-nineteenth century and the relationship between race and the onset of “total war” policies. It is my argument that enlisted soldiers in the Civil War era selectively waged total war using race and cultural standards as determining factors. A comparative analysis of the treatment of noncombatants throughout the United States between 1861 and 1865 demonstrates that nonwhites invariably suffered greater depredations at the hands of military forces than did whites. Five types of encounters are examined: 1) the treatment of white noncombatants by regular Union and Confederate forces; 2) …