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Home Front

Daily Life in the Civil War North

Daniel Greene author Sarah Burns author Diane Dillon author Scott Manning Stevens author Peter John Brownlee author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:18th Oct '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Home Front cover

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, focusing on Lincoln's determination to save the Union, or highlighting the cruelty 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 battlefields were not the only landscapes altered by the war. Countless individuals saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton industry; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battlefronts; 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.

"'The present is a year productive of strange and surprising events,' a newspaper editorialist wrote on July 4, 1861. 'It is one prolific of revolution and abounding in great and startling novelties.... We are entering, to say the least, upon a new and important epoch in the history of the world.' Today, when we look at Civil War images across the gulf of a century and a half, it is clear that those war years would prove to be an era not just of revolution, but also of revelation: the passing of timeworn realities and the intimation of things to come." (Adam Goodheart, author of 1861)"

  • Winner of PROSE (Art Exhibitions) 2013

ISBN: 9780226061856

Dimensions: 28mm x 22mm x 2mm

Weight: 992g

216 pages