A People at War

This is not, exactly, a history of the homefront during the Civil War. Its subtitle, “Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War,” includes the military, while the book’s time span extends the scope of this study from pre-war Bleeding Kansas to 1877, when the last units of an American army of occupation finally left the south. The authors largely leave the battlefields to others. Their concern is with the strains on civilians and soldiers alike. It was an age of anxiety—and of ch