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, often focusing on Lincoln's determination to save the Union, or
highlighting the brutality 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 the
frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians
saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered.
Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the
war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the
Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from
across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household
economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the
home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and
battle fronts; 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.
