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Children--white and black, northern and southern--endured a vast and varied range of experiences during the Civil War. Children celebrated victories and mourned defeats, tightened their belts and widened their responsibilities, took part in patriotic displays and suffered shortages and hardships, fled their homes to escape enemy invaders and snatched opportunities to run toward the promise of freedom.

Offering a fascinating look at how children were affected by our nation's greatest crisis, James Marten examines their toys and games, their literature and schoolbooks, the letters they exchanged with absent fathers and brothers, and the hardships they endured. He also explores children's politicization, their contributions to their homelands' war efforts, and the lessons they took away from the war. Drawing on the childhoods of such diverse Americans as Jane Addams, Booker T. Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt, and on sources that range from diaries and memoirs to children's amateur newspapers," Marten examines the myriad ways in which the Civil War shaped the lives of a generation of American children. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Children from a new angle
In this delightfully charming depiction of children during the American Civil War, Marten explores the war's meaning for both northern and southern, and white and black children.Although the experiences for children varied by location and skin color, Marten argues the information provided for children and their everyday experiences during the war served to politicize the children at an early age.
The brilliance behind Marten's work is the variety of incredible sources that he examined.Marten utilized not only a remarkable number of family collections, diaries, scrapbooks, letters, but also an impressive variety of publications by and for children during the Civil War, including textbooks, dime novels, journals and other periodicals.His research is truly extraordinary and provides an amazing number of examples and anecdotes for his text.
While Marten's book is an impressive examination of sources with a distinct, well-supported thesis, the organization of the book is somewhat disappointing.While it would be admittedly difficult to organize the vast amount of information he had collected, it would have made his book easier to follow had it been organized differently.
Marten's book is an important addition to the collection of Civil War literature.The Civil War was the ultimate test of the relatively new American-government, and the children who lived through it became the adults who made political decisions well into the twentieth century.Their politics determined our role in both internal and external conflicts for many decades to come.Additionally, examination of Civil War children is useful for studying the children of any major conflict, including the Second World War, whose children are still alive today.

wonderfully researched, full of information
This is a great book -- full of wonderful examples and descriptions of what life was like for kids of both sides during the Civil War.Lots of great quotes and examples.HOWEVER, the writing style is a bit too difficult for younger kids.I'd suggest this book for high school kids and adults.Overall, though, this is well researched and fascinating reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A tremendously exciting read
"A tremendously exciting read" Judge Sanford M. Brook

Deals with a real trial
Patricia Williams, Acting Justice of N.Y. Supreme Court says about Gun Crazy: "I truly enjoyed Mr. Booker's writing.He knows the secret of making you want to actually visit the scenes he describes so well. . . Mr. Booker's book is different than others, because it deals with the many different aspects of a real trial.Hence, the characters are drawn with detail and care."

Warren Burnett recommends this book
Warren Burnett said: "Superbly, writer Booker honors his craft in this story of a courtroom trimph made possible by the grit and grace of Kerrville's Scott Stehling, a true examply of the decent and talented lawyer."

Racehorse Haynes recommends this book
Racehorse Haynes said: "A brutal senseless crime, a skilled trial lawyer's fight for Justice for a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time.A must read for all interested in trial by jury." ... Read more

Product Description
Literary studies of James Joyce, perhaps more so than those of any other author, have been enriched by important developments in literary theory in the last twenty-five years. Noting a curious gap in this scholarship, M. Keith Booker brings the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, unquestionably one of the most important literary theorists of this century, to bear on Joyce's relationship to six of his literary predecessors. In clear and readable prose, Booker explores Joyce's dialogues not only with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, his three most obvious predecessors, but with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky, three literary figures important in Bakhtin's theoretical work.
These six writers provide the opportunity to examine Joyce's work with regard to several of Bakhtin's most important concepts. If Homer represents the authority of epic, Rabelais represents for Bakhtin the subversive multivocal energies of carnivalesque genres. As opposed to his description of Dante's attempts to escape from historicity, Bakhtin figures Goethe as the epitome of engagement with the temporality of everyday history. And Bakhtin's generic denial of polyphony in the works of Shakespeare contrasts with Bakhtin's identification of Dostoevsky as the most polyphonic writer in all the world of literature.
Together, Booker's comparative readings suggest a Joyce whose works are politically committed, historically engaged, and socially relevant. In short, they suggest a Joyce whose work differs radically from conventional notions of modernist literature as culturally elitist, historically detached, and more interested in individual psychology than in social reality.
M. Keith Booker is Professor of English, University of Arkansas.
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James Joyce has emerged as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, and his writings continue to invite enormous amounts of scholarly attention. This volume offers a careful reading of Joyce within the context of recent developments in postcolonial theory. Booker shows that Joyce's work provides critiques of capitalism and colonialism that have much in common with the works of more recent African and Caribbean writers. However, Joyce remains a fundamentally European writer whose work differs substantially from that of most postcolonial writers from Africa and the Caribbean. In pursuing these readings, Booker also pays careful attention to the cultural politics of Joyce criticism, arguing that ideological considerations arising primarily from the Cold War have, until now, strongly distorted readings of Joyce from all political perspectives. ... Read more

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The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity.
In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, Smethurst upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. Smethurst introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.
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This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on March 22, 1999. The length of the article is 751 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: General Area.(Review)
Author: James Gibbs
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1999
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 73Issue: 2Page: 373

Article Type: Book Review

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 190 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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This text offers introductory essays on eight major Caribbean novels and shorter essays on ten other Caribbean novels, as well as a brief historical survey of the development of the Caribbean novel.BR> North America: Heinemann; Caribbean: Ian Randle Publishers ... Read more