**With a new preface and updated historiographical essay.
**
Based on recent scholarship and deep research in primary sources,
especially the letters and diaries of "ordinary people," The Northern
Home Front during the Civil War is the first full narrative history and
analysis of the northern home front in almost a quarter-century. It
examines the mobilization, recruitment, management, politics, costs, and
experience of war from the perspective of the home front, with special
attention to the ways the war affected the ideas, identities, interests,
and issues shaping people's lives, and vice versa. The book looks
closely at people's responses to war's demands, whether in supporting
the Union cause or opposing it, and it measures the ways the war
transformed society and economy or simply reconfirmed ideas and
reinforced practices already underway. As The Northern Home Front
during the Civil War reveals, issues and concerns of emancipation,
conscription, civil liberties, economic policies and practices,
religion, party politics, war management, popular culture, and work were
all part of what Lincoln rightly termed "a People's Contest" and as much
as the armies in the field determined the outcome of the nation's ordeal
by fire. As The Northern Home Front during the Civil War shows,
understanding the experience of the women and men on the home front is
essential to realizing Walt Whitman's oft-quoted call to get "the real
war" into the books.
