Cookbooks offer a unique and valuable way to examine American life. Far from being recipe compendiums alone, cookbooks can reveal worlds of information about the daily lives, social practices, class aspirations, and cultural assumptions of people in the past. With a historical introduction and contextualizing annotations, this fascinating historical compilation of excerpts from five Civil War-era cookbooks presents a compelling portrait of cooking and eating in the urban north of the 1860s United States.

As companions to the first and second volumes in the American Food in History series we offer selections of recipes, updated and tested by food editor Jennifer Billock, using measurements and techniques that modern readers can use in their own kitchen. Arranged by main meal occasions (breakfast, picnic or lunch, dinner, dessert) these recipes--some familiar, some curious, all intriguing--will allow family and friends to get a "taste of the times" with their own "Civil War era" meals. The original versions of these recipes (and many more) can be found in Food in the Civil War Era: The North and Food in the Civil War Era: The South, edited by Helen Zoe Veit, along with fascinating essays about the history and the times.

Presents recipes used during the American Civil War, intertwining history and cuisine for insights into the lives of soldiers on the battlefield and their loved ones at home.

Godey's Lady's Book, perhaps the most popular magazine for women in nineteenth-century America, had a national circulation of 150,000 during the 1860s. The recipes (spelled ""receipts"") it published were often submitted by women from both the North and the South, and they reveal the wide variety of regional cooking that characterized American culture. There is a remarkable diversity in the recipes, thanks to the largely rural readership of Godey's Lady's Book and to the immigrant influence on the country in the 1860s. Fish and game were readily available in rural America, and the number of seafood recipes testifies to the abundance of the coastal waters and rivers. The country cook was a frugal cook, particularly during wartime, so there are a great many recipes for leftovers and seasonal produce. In addition to a wide sampling of recipes that can be used today, Civil War Recipes includes information on Union and Confederate army rations, cooking on both homefronts, and substitutions used during the war by southern cooks.

'From the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to the last shot fired at Appomattox, food played a crucial role in the Civil War. In Starving the South, culinary historian Andrew Smith takes a fascinating gastronomical look at the war and its aftermath. At the time, the North mobilized its agricultural resources, fed its civilians and military, and still had massive amounts of food to export to Europe. The South did not; while people starved, the morale of their soldiers waned and desertions from the Army of the Confederacy increased.....' (Book Jacket)

Archival images and biographical sketches of Union soldiers tell the stories of their lives during and after the Civil War. Before leaving to fight in the Civil War, many Union and Confederate soldiers posed for a carte de visite, or visiting card, to give to their families, friends, or sweethearts. Invented in 1854 by a French photographer, the carte de visite was a small photographic print roughly the size of a modern trading card. The format arrived in America on the eve of the Civil War, fueling intense demand for the keepsakes. Many cards of Civil War soldiers survive today, but the experiences?and often the names?of the individuals portrayed have been lost to time. A passionate collector of Civil War–era photography, Ron Coddington researched the history behind these anonymous faces in military records, pension files, and other public and personal documents. In Faces of the Civil War, Coddington presents 77 cartes de visite of Union soldiers from his collection and tells the stories of their lives during and after the war. These soldiers came from all walks of life. All were volunteers. Their personal stories reveal a tremendous diversity in their experience of war: many served with distinction, some were captured, some never saw combat while others saw little else. The lives of survivors were even more disparate. While some made successful transitions back to civilian life, others suffered permanent physical and mental disabilities, which too often wrecked their families and careers. In compelling words and haunting pictures, Faces of the Civil War offers a unique perspective on the most dramatic and wrenching period in American history.

Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation

She was called "The Florence Nightingale of America." From the fighting at Gettysburg to the capture of Richmond, this young Quaker nurse worked tirelessly to relieve the suffering of soldiers. She was one of the great heroines of the Union. Cornelia Hancock served in field and evacuating hospitals, in a contraband camp, and (defying authority) on the battlefield. Her letters to family members are witty, unsentimental, and full of indignation about the neglect of wounded soldiers and black refugees. Hancock was fiercely devoted to the welfare of the privates who had "nothing before them but hard marching, poor fare, and terrible fighting."

A matchless account of the Battle of Gettysburg, drawn from Shelby Foote’s landmark history of the Civil War Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronicle, The Civil War: A Narrative, was hailed by Walker Percy as “an unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist.” Here is the central chapter of the central volume, and therefore the capstone of the arch, in a single volume. Complete with detailed maps, Stars in Their Courses brilliantly recreates the three-day conflict: It is a masterly treatment of a key great battle and the events that preceded it—not as legend has it but as it really was, before it became distorted by controversy and overblown by remembered glory.

In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Captain George S. James ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter, beginning a war that would last four years and claim many lives. This book brings together a collection of voices to help explain the commencement of Am.