The Imagined Civil War

The American Civil War inspired a remarkable outpouring of popular literature. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a torrent of war related works, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories and even humorous pieces. Mining these long-neglected sources, Alice Fahs demonstrates that instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals - including African-Americans - to the nation.