Download Ebook The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell. Happy reading! This is exactly what we wish to say to you who love reading so a lot. What regarding you that assert that reading are only commitment? Never ever mind, reviewing routine ought to be started from some certain factors. One of them is reviewing by commitment. As exactly what we wish to provide right here, the publication qualified The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell is not type of required publication. You can enjoy this publication The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell to review.
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell
Download Ebook The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell. Reviewing makes you much better. Which says? Numerous sensible words claim that by reading, your life will be a lot better. Do you think it? Yeah, show it. If you require guide The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell to review to prove the sensible words, you can visit this page completely. This is the site that will supply all guides that most likely you need. Are the book's collections that will make you really feel interested to review? One of them right here is the The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell that we will certainly propose.
Right here, we have various e-book The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell as well as collections to review. We likewise offer variant types as well as kinds of the books to browse. The fun e-book, fiction, history, novel, science, as well as other kinds of publications are offered right here. As this The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell, it turneds into one of the preferred e-book The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell collections that we have. This is why you are in the appropriate website to see the amazing publications to own.
It will not take even more time to get this The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell It won't take even more money to print this publication The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell Nowadays, individuals have actually been so clever to make use of the technology. Why do not you use your gizmo or other tool to save this downloaded soft data publication The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell By doing this will certainly let you to constantly be accompanied by this book The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell Naturally, it will certainly be the finest good friend if you read this publication The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell up until finished.
Be the initial to download this book now and get all reasons why you should read this The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell Guide The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell is not just for your tasks or requirement in your life. Publications will certainly always be a buddy in each time you check out. Now, allow the others find out about this web page. You could take the advantages as well as discuss it additionally for your pals and individuals around you. By by doing this, you can truly obtain the definition of this e-book The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, By Reid Mitchell profitably. Exactly what do you assume concerning our idea here?
In many ways, the Northern soldier in the Civil War fought as if he had never left home. On campsites and battlefields, the Union volunteer adapted to military life with attitudes shaped by networks of family relationships, in units of men from the same hometown. Understanding these links between the homes the troops left behind and the war they had to fight, writes Reid Mitchell, offers critical insight into how they thought, fought, and persevered through four bloody years of combat.
In The Vacant Chair, Mitchell draws on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of common soldiers to show how mid-nineteenth-century ideas and images of the home and family shaped the union soldier's approach to everything from military discipline to battlefield bravery. For hundreds of thousands of "boys," as they called themselves, the Union army was an extension of their home and childhood experiences. Many experienced the war as a coming-of-age rite, a test of such manly virtues as self-control, endurance, and courage. They served in companies recruited from the same communities, and they wrote letters reporting on each other's performance--conscious that their own behavior in the army would affect their reputations back home. So, too, were they deeply affected by letters from their families, as wives and mothers complained of suffering or demanded greater valor. Mitchell also shows how this hometown basis for volunteer units eroded respect for military rank, as men served with officers they saw as equals: "Lieut Col Dewey introduced Hugh T Reid," one sergeant wrote dryly, "by saying, 'Boys, behold your colonel,' and we _beheld_ him." In return, officers usually adopted paternalist attitudes toward their "boys"--especially in the case of white officers commanding black soldiers. Mitchell goes on to look at the role of women in the soldiers' experiences, from the feminine center of their own households to their hatred of Confederate women as "she-devils."
The intimate relations and inner life of the Union soldier, the author writes, tell us much about how and why he kept fighting through four bloody years--and why demoralization struck the Confederate soldier as the war penetrated the South, threatening his home and family while he was at the front. "The Northern soldier did not simply experience the war as a husband, son, father, or brother--he fought that way as well," he writes. "That was part of his strength. The Confederate soldier fought the war the same way, and, in the end, that proved part of his weakness." The Vacant Chair uncovers this critical chapter in the Civil War experience, showing how the Union soldier saw--and won--our most costly conflict.
- Sales Rank: #2165876 in Books
- Published on: 1993-08-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.56" h x .93" w x 5.81" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
- 5x10 inches, 201 pages, Light blue and navy blue hardcover
- Jackt with scene of old photo .
From Kirkus Reviews
An insightful glance at the unique cultural and social milieu of the Union soldier. Relying extensively on diaries, letters, and other primary sources, Mitchell (History/University of Maryland; Civil War Soldiers, 1988) discusses how the Union soldier understood his military experience. Antebellum ideology used the family as a metaphor for one's country, emphasizing the ``Republican Mother'' who educated her sons as self-sacrificing patriots; thus, ``the centrality of home and the family made them central to the Northern soldier's understanding of the Civil War.'' Soldiers--serving under officers who often came from the same town and who were thought of as equals--regarded their generals as fathers, their officers as elder brothers, and the war itself as a family quarrel. That men soldiered with lifelong neighbors and friends meant that the Union soldier brought the value of the home front into battle with him, giving war a sense of purpose: It also frequently weakened military discipline. Mitchell discusses in depth the Union soldier's distinctive view of manhood; his complex relationships with white Southern women--and with black soldiers, who were generally excluded from the American ``family''; his peculiar brand of religion; and his attitude toward death in battle. Mitchell sees as significant the Union focus in the late Civil War against Confederate civilian society, a focus that weakened the Southern soldier's will to resist: Observing that the Union soldier's strength was that he fought the war with home in mind, he notes that ``the Confederate soldier fought the war the same way, and, in the end, that proved part of his weakness.'' An eloquent revival of the simple verities of a vanished era- -idealism, patriotism, small-town parochialism, sense of family and manhood, and fear of failing in the eyes of one's community--that drove the soldier of the North. (Twenty-five halftones) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A tidy and compact study....Offer[s] refreshing insight into an understanding of how the north persevered in its struggle toward ultimate victory and who the South's resolve to resist eventually disintegrated....The Vacant Chair reflects the kind of solid scholarship the Civil War era needs."--Journal of American Culture
"The book is full of well-chosen anecdotes, character sketches and vignettes which give the war a peculiar immedicay to the reader. One cannot help but feel personally involved....[T]his is an excellent book."--KLIATT, November 1995
"Many excellent anecdotes....Truly fascinating."--The New York Times Book Review
"This sensitive, incisive work comes closer than anything I have read to exploring what the Northern soldier believed he was fighting for and why he was ready to die for the Union."--George M. Fredrickson, author of White Supremacy and The Inner Civil War
"Reid Mitchell breaks new ground in this imaginative contribution....Combining the insights of psychology, women's history and social history, The Vacant Chair accomplishes the difficult. It offers new perspectives on an old topic. Soldiering expands beyond shouldering a rifle and following the colonel's order in Mitchell's excellent volume."--Jean Baker, author of Mary Todd Lincoln
About the Author
About The Author:
Reid Mitchell is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and is the author of Civil War Soldiers, which was a main selection of the History Book Club and an alternate selection of the Book of the Month Club.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Serpinius
Very pleased.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Personal experiences in a time of turmoil
By A Customer
The Vacant Chair adds a personal element to the dates learned in history class. The words and feelings expressed by soldiers recounts a time lost - dedication to an ideal, and courage. Families during the Civil War lived day to day wondering if loved ones were alive, and Mitchell captures their turmoil and hope through the letters and thoughts of soldiers and their families. Although the book focuses on the Northern soldier, one can imagine similar sentiments from both sides. An excellent addition to the history buff's library.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Understanding the Northern Soldier
By Arador
In this book Mitchell looks at the Northern soldier during the Civil War. He uses journals and letters to let the soldiers, nurses, and family members speak for themselves. He really gets inside the heads of the men who fought for the Union. His chapters cover motivations for enlistment, war experiences, encounters with Confederate soldiers and civilians, and how Northerners coped with death. Northern soldiers joined the army to preserve the Union, to fight beside their friends, and protect their families. Many young men considered the war to be their "coming of age" experience. Enlistment was viewed as masculine duty; the army was often considered to be one big family.
Northerners struggled with seeing the South for the first time; Yankees felt like they were in a foreign country. They often derided the lack of industry and the South's laziness (in their opinions) due to reliance on slave labor. Some Northerners became abolitionists as a result of army service, they saw the effects of slavery for the first time in person and were appalled by the horrible conditions they saw on plantations.
In the South, family livelihoods were torn apart by the invading armies, slavery was unraveling before their very eyes, and the government was unable to support the army and the citizens. Often the family back home would encourage soldier's to desert to keep them safe. Many Confederates soldier's thought the war would never end, and eventually they gave up on the Confederate cause, because their families were more important to them. In the end the North's determination to win, the necessity to preserve the Union, their views of domesticity and patriotism, and the support of the home community and family gave them the strength to endure.
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell PDF
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell EPub
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell Doc
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell iBooks
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell rtf
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell Mobipocket
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, by Reid Mitchell Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar