Download or read book Diary of the Civil War 1860 1865 written by George Templeton Strong and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1962 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The War Outside My Window written by Janet Elizabeth Croon and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable account of the collapse of the Old South and the final years of a young boy’s privileged but afflicted life. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty twelve-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860—just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old South is published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded—often in horrific detail—an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South. Winner, 2018, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award

Download or read book Diary of the Civil War 1860 written by George Templeton Strong and published by . This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sam Richards s Civil War Diary written by Samuel P. Richards and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This previously unpublished diary is the best-surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War-era Atlanta. Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) kept a diary for sixty-seven years. This volume excerpts the diary from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City. The Richardses were among the last Confederate loyalists to leave Atlanta. Sam's recollections of the Union bombardment, the evacuation of the city, the looting of his store, and the influx of Yankee forces are riveting. Sam was a Unionist until 1860, when his sentiments shifted in favor of the Confederacy. However, as he wrote in early 1862, he had "no ambition to acquire military renown and glory." Likewise, Sam chafed at financial setbacks caused by the war and at Confederate policies that seemed to limit his freedom. Such conflicted attitudes come through even as Sam writes about civic celebrations, benefit concerts, and the chaotic optimism of life in a strategically critical rebel stronghold. He also reflects with soberness on hospitals filled with wounded soldiers, the threat of epidemics, inflation, and food shortages. A man of deep faith who liked to attend churches all over town, Sam often commments on Atlanta's religious life and grounds his defense of slavery and secession in the Bible. Sam owned and rented slaves, and his diary is a window into race relations at a time when the end of slavery was no longer unthinkable. Perhaps most important, the diary conveys the tenor of Sam's family life. Both Sam and his wife, Sallie, came from families divided politically and geographically by war. They feared for their children's health and mourned for relatives wounded and killed in battle. The figures in Sam Richards's Civil War Diary emerge as real people; the intimate experience of the Civil War home front is conveyed with great power.

Download or read book Diary of a Contraband written by William Benjamin Gould and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart of this book is the remarkable Civil War diary of the author’s great-grandfather, William Benjamin Gould, an escaped slave who served in the United States Navy from 1862 until the end of the war. The diary vividly records Gould’s activity as part of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia; his visits to New York and Boston; the pursuit to Nova Scotia of a hijacked Confederate cruiser; and service in European waters pursuing Confederate ships constructed in Great Britain and France. Gould’s diary is one of only three known diaries of African American sailors in the Civil War. It is distinguished not only by its details and eloquent tone (often deliberately understated and sardonic), but also by its reflections on war, on race, on race relations in the Navy, and on what African Americans might expect after the war. The book includes introductory chapters that establish the context of the diary narrative, an annotated version of the diary, a brief account of Gould’s life in Massachusetts after the war, and William B. Gould IV’s thoughts about the legacy of his great-grandfather and his own journey of discovery in learning about this remarkable man.

Download or read book Journal of a Secesh Lady written by Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston and published by North Carolina Division of Archives & History. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston presents a unique portrait of Civil War North Carolina. Wife of a prominent planter and slaveholder in Halifax County, North Carolina, Mrs. Edmondston spent most of the war on the family plantations Hascosea and Looking Glass. Occasionally she made trips with her husband Patrick to Richmond, Virginia, and to various eastern North Carolina towns. Despite this relative isolation and insulation Kate Edmondston's imagination and inquisitive mind allowed her to observe and follow closely the progress of the war. An avid reader of newspapers, particularly those from the Confederate capital Richmond, she commented extensively on the war and recorded in minute detail the strategies and maneuverings of the Confederate and Union armies, casualties among North Carolina troops, and the weaknesses and strengths of various leaders, North and South, local and sectional. She also fancied herself a poet and wrote odes to various fallen heroes and to the southern war effort. One of her poems even found its way into print in a South Carolina newspaper. Clearly she was influenced by poets and novelists of the Romantic period, for her diary abound with allusions to many pieces of classical literature and the Bible. A diehard "secesh lady," in her own words, she was uncompromisingly prosouthern in her loyalties and intensely bitter toward Unionists, Abraham Lincoln, and northern generals like Benjamin Butler and William Sherman. Inept Confederates and southern leaders she considered undeserving political lackeys did not escape her vitriolic pen, however. The diary reveals a rich mosaic of family, class, and sectional connections. It provides in addition an unusually intimate glimpse of plantation life and the social consequences of war as the conflict crept closer and as a miasma of fear and uncertainty enveloped eastern North Carolina. Mrs. Edmondston's distinct and finely etched class views of nonslaveholding whites, slaves, and freedmen and her perception of the role of women in southern society undergird the entire journal. An intriguing social document in itself, the diary depicts with profound clarity the shattering impact of the war on southern women in particular, whose circumscribed lives were suddenly exposed to the ravages of war and poverty. Characterized by new insights into the Civil War experience on the southern home front, and filled with copious data for historians and genealogists, the Edmondston diary will appeal to many readers as simply a gripping tale of southern life during the conflict. As such, it rivals some of the best-known accounts of the Civil War, including the diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Download or read book Emilie Davis s Civil War written by Judith Giesberg and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community. Her diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in “real time” and are a counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period. Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of wartime Philadelphia. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war’s major events, Davis’s diaries give us a rare look at how the war was experienced as a part of everyday life—how its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected a northern city with a vibrant black community.

Download or read book Inside Lincoln s White House written by Michael Burlingame and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 18 April 1861, assistant presidential secretary John Hay recorded in his diary the report of several women that "some young Virginian long haired swaggering chivalrous of course. . . and half a dozen others including a daredevil guerrilla from Richmond named Ficklin would do a thing within forty eight hours that would ring through the world." The women feared that the Virginian planned either to assassinate or to capture the president. Calling this a "harrowing communication," Hay continued his entry: "They went away and I went to the bedside of the Chief couché. I told him the yarn; he quietly grinned." This is but one of the dramatic entries in Hay’s Civil War diary, presented here in a definitive edition by Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger. Justly deemed the most intimate record we will ever have of Abraham Lincoln in the White House, the Hay diary is, according to Burlingame and Ettlinger, "one of the richest deposits of high-grade ore for the smelters of Lincoln biographers and Civil War historians." While the Cabinet diaries of Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Gideon Welles also shed much light on Lincoln’s presidency, as does the diary of Senator Orville Hickman Browning, none of these diaries has the literary flair of Hay’s, which is, as Lincoln’s friend Horace White noted, as "breezy and sparkling as champagne." An aspiring poet, Hay recorded events in a scintillating style that the lawyer-politician diarists conspicuously lacked. Burlingame and Ettlinger’s edition of the diary is the first to publish the complete text of all of Hay’s entries from 1861 through 1864. In 1939 Tyler Dennett published Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay, which, as Civil War historian Allan Nevins observed, was "rather casually edited." This new edition is essential in part because Dennett omitted approximately 10 percent of Hay’s 1861–64 entries. Not only did the Dennett edition omit important parts of the diaries, it also introduced some glaring errors. More than three decades ago, John R. Turner Ettlinger, then in charge of Special Collections at the Brown University Library, made a careful and literal transcript of the text of the diary, which involved deciphering Hay’s difficult and occasionally obscure writing. In particular, passages were restored that had been canceled, sometimes heavily, by the first editors for reasons of confidentiality and propriety. Ettlinger’s text forms the basis for the present edition, which also incorporates, with many additions and much updating by Burlingame, a body of notes providing a critical apparatus to the diary, identifying historical events and persons.

Download or read book Fear in North Carolina written by Cornelia Catherine Smith Henry and published by Reminiscing Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cornelia Henrys three journals, written between 1860 and 1868, offer an excellent source for daily information on western North Carolina during the Civil War period.

Download or read book I Am Perhaps Dying written by Dennis A. Rasbach and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invalid teenager Leroy Wiley Gresham left a seven-volume diary spanning the years of secession and the Civil War (1860-1865). He was just 12 when he began and he died at 17, just weeks after the war ended. His remarkable account, recently published as The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865, edited by Janet E. Croon (2018), spans the gamut of life events that were of interest to a precocious and well-educated Southern teenager—including military, political, religious, social, and literary matters of the day. This alone ranks it as an important contribution to our understanding of life and times in the Old South. But it is much more than that. Chronic disease and suffering stalk the young writer, who is never told he is dying until just before his death. Dr. Rasbach, a graduate of Johns Hopkins medical school and a practicing general surgeon with more than three decades of experience, was tasked with solving the mystery of LeRoy’s disease. Like a detective, Dr. Rasbach peels back the layers of mystery by carefully examining the medical-related entries. What were LeRoy’s symptoms? What medicines did doctors prescribe for him? What course did the disease take, month after month, year after year? The author ably explores these and other issues in I Am Perhaps Dying to conclude that the agent responsible for LeRoy’s suffering and demise turns out to be Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a tiny but lethal adversary of humanity since the beginning of recorded time. In the second half of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accounting for one-third of all deaths. Even today, a quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB, and the disease remains one of the top ten causes of death, claiming 1.7 million lives annually, mostly in poor and underdeveloped countries. While the young man was detailing the decline and fall of the Old South, he was also chronicling his own horrific demise from spinal TB. These five years of detailed entries make LeRoy’s diary an exceedingly rare (and perhaps unique) account from a nineteenth century TB patient. LeRoy’s diary offers an inside look at a fateful journey that robbed an energetic and likeable young man of his youth and life. I Am Perhaps Dying adds considerably to the medical literature by increasing our understanding of how tuberculosis attacked a young body over time, how it was treated in the middle nineteenth century, and the effectiveness of those treatments.

Download or read book Diary The Civil War 1860 1865 written by George Templeton Strong and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Diary From Dixie written by Mary Boykin Chesnut and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madison & Adams Press presents the Civil War Memories Series. This meticulous selection of the firsthand accounts, memoirs and diaries is specially comprised for Civil War enthusiasts and all people curious about the personal accounts and true life stories of the unknown soldiers, the well known commanders, politicians, nurses and civilians amidst the war. "A Diary From Dixie" is a Civil War diary which paints a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle." The author described the war from within her upper-class circles of Southern planter society, but encompassed all classes in her book. Literary critics have praised Chesnut's diary. The influential writer Edmund Wilson termed it "a work of art", "masterpiece" of the genre and the most important work by a Confederate author.

Download or read book The Cormany Diaries written by James Mohr and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 1982-12-15 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique pair of diaries offers an unforgettable account of the life of an average Northern family coping with the dangers and tensions of the Civil War. There were thousands like them, but few left such a clear and indelible record of their experiences.Rachel Cormany (nee Bowman) met Samuel Cormany at Otterbein University in Ohio. After her husband enlisted in a cavalry unit, she writes poignantly of her anxieties, poverty, and loneliness. Samuel, on the other hand, is ambitious in his military career, and tells enthusiastically about his engagements that include camp life, cavalry raids, army politics, and his battles with alcohol. Editor James C. Mohr has arranged the diaries so that the voices of husband and wife alternate, and his notes enlighten many of the issues relating to the diarists and their daily lives.

Download or read book A Woman s Civil War written by Cornelia Peake McDonald and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cornelia Peake McDonald kept a diary during the Civil War (1861- 1865) at her husband's request, but some entries were written between the lines of printed books due to a shortage of paper and other entries were lost. In 1875, she assembled her scattered notes and records of the war period into a blank book to leave to her children. The diary entries describe civilian life in Winchester, Va., occupation by Confederate troops prior to the 1st Manassas, her husband's war experiences, the Valley campaigns and occupation of Winchester and her home by Union troops, the death of her baby girl, the family's "refugee life" in Lexington, reports of battles elsewhere, and news of family and friends in the army.

Download or read book The Diary of George Templeton Strong written by George Templeton Strong and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Civil War in Apacheland written by George O. Hand and published by High Lonesome Books. This book was released on 1996 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The publication of Whiskey, Six-Guns and Red-Light Ladies in 1994 introduced readers to the ribald 1870s diary of frontier saloon keeper, George Hand. More than a decade earlier, George Hand kept another spirited journal, this one recording his service with the Union Army. Marching from California through Arizona, West Texas and southern New Mexico, Sergeant Hand and the other volunteers of the California Column protected the southwest from further invasions by the Texas Rebels. Their hardships and adventures are recorded in Hand's salty journal; heat, dust, thirst and cold; ethnic tensions, frontier whiskey, and Apache depredations; bad food and disease; and imperious officers whom enlisted man Hand does not hesitate to cuss. George Hand also hunted ducks and quail in a pristine Southwest, pulled huge catfish from the Rio Grande, and rescued a damsel in distress. The Civil War in Apacheland provides an intimate view of a little-known theater of the Civil War, and is the first-hand chronicle of an army that contributed mightily to the American settlement of the Southwest.

Download or read book Mary Chesnut s Diary written by Mary Boykin Chesnut and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unrivalled account of the American Civil War from the Confederate perspective. One of the most compelling personal narratives of the Civil War, Mary Chesnut's Diary was written between 1861 and 1865. As the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and the wife of an aide to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, Chesnut was well acquainted with the Confederacy's prominent players and-from the very first shots in Charleston, South Carolina-diligently recorded her impressions of the conflict's most significant moments. One of the most frequently cited memoirs of the war, Mary Chesnut's Diary captures the urgency and nuance of the period in an epic rich with commentary on race, status, and power within a nation divided. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.