Civil War Diary Research Articles

Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson (review)

Reviewed by: Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey by Peter Carlson Lorien Foote (bio) Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey. By Peter Carlson. (New York: Public Affairs, 2013. Pp. 268. Cloth, $26.99; paper, $15.99.) It is fitting that a former Washington Post journalist would write a book about the grand adventures of the Civil War’s most famous journalists, Junius Henri Browne and Albert Deane Richardson. Peter Carlson shares with his subjects a flair for narrating a dramatic tale, albeit in a literary style more suited to his twenty-first-century audience’s taste, and a wry, dry wit that survived the experience of living in, or in Carlson’s case writing about, Civil War prisons. Basing his narrative mainly on the separate book-length accounts that Browne and Richardson published in 1865, Carlson tells the intrinsically exciting story of two self-styled Bohemians who escaped from Salisbury Prison on December 18, 1864, and successfully reached Union lines at Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, in mid-January 1865. They were guided and helped along the way by slaves, children, bushwhackers, entire branches of Unionist families in the Appalachian Mountains, a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, and the famous pilot Dan Ellis. All of this makes for page-turning reading, and Carlson proves himself to be a capable historian in piecing together the identities of individuals that Browne and Richardson encountered and in tracking down letters and other primary sources that fill in the story his heroes told. Browne and Richardson’s Civil War odyssey began when they were writers for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Richardson conducted a secret tour of several southern states during the secession crisis and sent anonymous reports to the newspaper with scathing criticisms of slavery and of [End Page 611] southern bombast, ignorance, and closed-mindedness; in the first two years of the war both men were part of the pioneering cadre of war correspondents who termed themselves the “Bohemian Brigade.” Carlson is at his best in his depiction of the lifestyle of Civil War journalists and of their attitudes toward their craft. In particular he brings to life Browne’s purposely eccentric and self-consciously cynical personality. Confederates captured the two Bohemians on May 4, 1863, on the Mississippi River and shipped them to Richmond. Although they had paroles from their Vicksburg captors, the Confederate agent of exchange, Robert Ould, refused to release them. Indeed, at one point he claimed they were hostages for every single southern noncombatant that the Union held. Imprisoned first in Libby, then in Castle Thunder, Browne and Richardson were transferred to Salisbury in February 1864, where they witnessed that prison’s transformation from relatively comfortable quarters to a squalid death trap when nearly ten thousand prisoners arrived in the early fall. Living in comparative privilege indoors, Richardson and Browne helped their fellow inmates as much as they could before their escape in December. Carlson comments in an appendix that “this isn’t an academic book so I see no need for footnotes,” but this reviewer is tasked with the job of writing a review for an academic journal (257). Keeping in mind that the intention behind this book is simply to tell a good story with factual accuracy, I have a few observations about the historical context that informs Browne and Richardson’s story. Carlson consulted a minimal number of scholarly works, judging by his appendix, and these were concentrated on Civil War journalism and guerrilla violence in the Appalachians. Broader reading would have enriched Carlson’s depiction of Browne and Richardson’s world. The journalists experienced the momentous burgeoning and subsequent collapse of the entire Confederate prison system that resulted in thousands of escapes from North and South Carolina prisons in the winter of 1864–65. Carlson attributes conditions at Salisbury to the simple fact that the Confederates were “running out of food” and is seemingly unaware of the mass movement of escaped prisoners from South Carolina prisons toward Knoxville that occurred at the same time his story takes place (144). African Americans appear in this tale as heroic and generous friends to Yankees, but...

The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion, Kimberly Harrison

The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion, Kimberly Harrison

The rhetoric of rebel women: Civil War diaries and Confederate persuasion

The rhetoric of rebel women: Civil War diaries and Confederate persuasion

Among the Enemy: A Michigan Soldier's Civil War Journal (review)

Among the Enemy: A Michigan Soldier's Civil War Journal (review)

The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion

The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion

Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South by Helen P. Trimpi and; A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parks Caldwell edited by George H. Jones and; Double Duty in the Civil War: The Letters of Sailor and Soldier Edward W. Bacon edited by George S. Burkhardt (review)

Reviewed by: Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South by Helen P. Trimpi and; A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parks Caldwell edited by George H. Jones and; Double Duty in the Civil War: The Letters of Sailor and Soldier Edward W. Bacon edited by George S. Burkhardt Jennifer R. Green (bio) Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South. By Helen P. Trimpi. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. 408. Cloth, $59.00.) A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parks Caldwell. Edited by George H. Jones. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010. Pp. 277. Paper, $35.00.) Double Duty in the Civil War: The Letters of Sailor and Soldier Edward W. Bacon. Edited by George S. Burkhardt. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. Pp. 288. Cloth, $27.95.) Attractively produced with images, these three books represent some of the diversity in Civil War publications on young soldiers’ experiences: a biographical register, a diary, and a heavily commented journal interspersed with letters. In Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South, Helen P. Trimpi presents thorough, alphabetically organized entries on college matriculates turned Confederates providing family, service, and career data. In A Northern Confederate at Johnson’s Island Prison: The Civil War Diaries of James Parks Caldwell, George H. Jones provides two [End Page 591] introductory essays to a complete diary of a northerner and teacher turned Confederate prisoner of war. In Double Duty in the Civil War: The Letters of Sailor and Soldier Edward W. Bacon, George S. Burkhardt explains the journal and correspondence of a U.S. sailor turned U.S. Colored Troops officer. Together, these works allow scholars and enthusiasts to read about the variety of youths’ actions in the war and to share their experiences, although the first two texts focus on their subjects without offering substantial context. The topic that loosely binds these works is educated middle-class or elite men entering Civil War service. Trimpi describes the alumni of Harvard College and its professional law, medical, and engineering schools who served in the Confederate military, while Jones and Burkhardt offer primary sources on individuals serving on each side. Jones’s subject is James Parks Caldwell, the son of an Ohio doctor, who attended Miami University of Ohio but moved south to work as a teacher as he trained for the bar and then enlisted in the Confederate army in Mississippi. On the opposing side, Edward Bacon, the son of a Connecticut abolitionist (and procolonization) minister, entered the Union navy at eighteen. The two young men shared the boredom, loneliness, and uncertainty facing soldiers. All three books convey servicemen’s duties and experiences, with the correspondence packing the most emotional punch. The omissions therein are as interesting as the inclusions, however; Burkhardt notes that Bacon rarely wrote about abolition or African American rights, even as he trained black troops, and prisoner Caldwell expressed few personal feelings, typical of many nineteenth-century journals. In Crimson Confederates, Harvard alumna and English professor Helen Trimpi provides data on antebellum Harvard alumni with detailed entries on 357 individuals produced from extensive research in the Harvard archives, service records, and histories. As a reference work, the book does not attempt to create a narrative along the lines of Gerard A. Patterson’s Rebels from West Point (1987). Trimpi’s introduction remains centered on individuals but discusses the memorialization of Harvard’s Civil War soldiers, including the university’s rejection of a public memorial for Confederates; it reflects current interest in historical memory. Throughout the register, familiar names appear, especially those of lesser-known men of notable families, such as Rooney Lee, one of the fifteen Harvard-educated generals. Some entries cover multiple pages, contain quotations from the subject’s contemporaries and biographers, and may impart excessive detail or minutia; for example, Alexander R. Lawton replaced a quartermaster who resigned on August 10, 1863, and he was accompanied by his four children and wife, who is described by the ubiquitous Mary Chestnut. The information in Trimpi’s work focuses more on military history than college [End Page 592] experience. Appendices include...

Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts

Book Review| July 01 2013 Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts. Edited by Richard M. Reid. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 288 pp. Illustrations. $39.95 (cloth. Michael A. Flannery Michael A. Flannery Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2013) 32 (4): 84–85. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.4.0084 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael A. Flannery; Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2013; 32 (4): 84–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.4.0084 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Civil War Journal of Private Heyward Emmell, Ambulance and Infantry Corps: A Very Disagreeable War ed. by Jim Malcolm (review)

The Civil War Journal of Private Heyward Emmell, Ambulance and Infantry Corps: A Very Disagreeable War ed. by Jim Malcolm (review)

Civil War journalism

This book examines newspapers, magazines, photographs, illustrations, and editorial cartoons to tell the important story of journalism, documenting its role during the Civil War as well as the impact of the war on the press. Civil War Journalism presents a unique synthesis of the journalism of both the North and South during the war. It features a compelling cast of characters, including editors Horace Greeley and John M. Daniel, correspondents George Smalley and Peter W. Alexander, photographers Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, and illustrators Alfred Waud and Thomas Nast. Written to appeal to those interested in the Civil War in general and in journalism specifically, as well as general readers, the work provides an introductory overview of journalism in the North and South on the eve of the Civil War. The following chapters examine reporting during the war, editorializing about the war, photographing and illustrating the war, censorship and government relations, and the impact of the war on the press.

John Philip Sousa’s America: The Patriot’s Life in Images and Words by John Philip Sousa IV and Loras John Schissel, and: “Bully for the Band!”: The Civil War Letters and Diary of Four Brothers in the 10 th Vermont Infantry Band: Charles George, Herbert George, Jere George and Osman George ed. by James G. Davis, and: Connecticut’s Fife & Drum

(NORTH) AMERICANAJohn Philip Sousa's America: The Patriot's Life in Images and Words. By John Philip Sousa IV with Loras John Schissel. Chicago: GIA Publica - tions, 2012. [214 pp. ISBN 9781579998837. $34.95.] Illustrations, CD.Bully for the Band!: The Civil War Letters and Diary of Four Brothers in the 10th Vermont Infantry Band: Charles George, Herbert George, Jere George and Osman George. Edited by James G. Davis. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2012. [x, 290 pp. ISBN 9780786466863. $49.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Connecticut's Fife & Drum Tradition. By James Clark. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. [xiii, 167 pp. ISBN 9780819571410. $29.95] Musical examples, illustrations, bibliography.Without doubt, John Philip Sousa is America's most frequently performed and internationally recognized composer. While his operettas, songs, suites, waltzes and other concert pieces are performed infrequently these days, his marches are ubiquitous. With the unprecedented success of his Washington Post in Europe and America, especially after being adopted by dancing masters as the two-step, a British band journal in the 1890s suggested that Sousa should be called the King. Since then, there has been an Austrian March King ( Josef Franz Wagner), a British March King (Frederick Ricketts/Kenneth Alford), a Czech March King ( Julius Fuciik) and significant march composers in France (Gabriel Allier), Germany (Hermann Blanken burg, Franz von Blon) and Italy (Giovanni Orsomando), but while all of these have composed many excellent marches, none has achieved superiority over Sousa either for quantity or for consistently fine compositions. Recognition of Sousa's foremost place among march composers came in 1987 when Congress legislated The Stars and Stripes Forever as the national march of the United States of America.Paul Bierley has devoted his life to researching Sousa and his band. With a comprehensive biography ( John Philip Sousa, American Phenomenon, 1973, rev. 1998), a works list (The Works of John Philip Sousa, 1984), a revision of Sousa's 1928 autobiography (Marching Along: Recollections of Men, Women and Music, 1994), an index to The Sousa Band (Fraternal Society News, 1998), and an in-depth study of the Sousa Band, complete with performance dates, programs, and personnel (The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa, 2006), he has long hoped to prepare a coffee-table book filled with pictures and quotations of Sousa and the band members. Unfortunately, a stroke that lefthim partially paralyzed frustrated his efforts. He called on friends to help bring his dream to fruition.John Philip Sousa IV and Loras John Schissel have now accomplished that mission, and the book is dedicated to Paul Bierley and his wife Pauline. Although slim by coffee-table standards, the book is a delightful compilation of illustrations and quotations. With constant references to my my great-grandmother, my grandfather and Aunt Priscilla, it is obviously a labor of love on the part of their great-grandson. It is also a paean to his great-grandfather, so do not expect to find documentation, bibliography or index. It is not meant to be a scholarly book, but the illustrations, many of them new even to Sousa scholars, are delightful. Sousa IV credits co-author Schissel, who works at the Library of Congress, and the director and staffof the US Marine Band for help in finding the gems presented in the volume.The volume is divided into time frames, with photos, illustrations and quotations for each period, beginning with Sousa's early childhood. The many caricatures from newspapers give an idea of Sousa's conducting style on the podium. One sometimes regrets that complete identification of the musicians in the formal band portraits is not included, but then that would call for a different kind of book. In some cases, however, it would be interesting to have more information than what is given. …

Exploring old and new media: Comparing military blogs to Civil War letters

Comparing new media to older media can help identify fundamental uses and perceived effects of communication technology. This study analyzes one soldier’s milblog (military blog) and one Civil War soldier’s letters and diaries to understand how milblogs compare to older forms of soldier correspondence. Despite the overt distinction in technical systems utilized, this analysis demonstrated that the communications through the milblog and letters/diaries share tremendous similarities. In composing their correspondence through these distinct media, each soldier maintained similar anxieties over technological affordances, perceptions of their audience, and motivations for corresponding. Though there were certainly differences in style and content, little that was done or accomplished via the milblog was without direct precedent in the Civil War letters and diaries.

The Civil War Days of Captain Charles D. Roush: Company B, 6th Pennsylvania Regiment Reserves

The Civil War diary of Capt. Charles Roush provides valuable insight into the life of a Union soldier who marched in 1861 and 1862 through the rolling hills of Maryland and Virginia, ending at the battle of South Mountain, where Roush was injured, just a couple of days prior to Antietam.His diary relates the dreariness of war. Disease was arguably a far more potent adversary than the Southern troops. Winter brought bad weather, much sickness, as well as McCellan’s infamous forced “promenade” through northern Virginia.In May 1862, after returning from a long march, Roush encountered two special visitors to his camp: the President and Secretary of War. Lincoln also appeared at Roush’s station a second time. Nevertheless, Roush quickly lost his interest for war. His diary relates that he was “opposed to a political abolition war.” His diary contained constant references to his poor health. At one point, he noted, “he had no provisions for 3 days.” In September Roush suffered the injury that ended his Civil War career. A musket ball struck him in the foot. Unbeknownst to Roush, the injury spared him from the rigors of the bloody battle of Antietam.

A "Sisters' War": Kentucky Women and Their Civil War Diaries

A "Sisters' War": Kentucky Women and Their Civil War Diaries

The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context (review)

Reviewed by: The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context Lauren Kaminsky The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context, edited by Gregory Freidin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 288 pp. $60.00. The Enigma of Isaac Babel is infused with a sense of loss: Babel’s manuscripts and correspondence were arrested with him, presumed lost in the wake of his execution at the age of forty-five. Laments of a life cut short, stories never written, and papers presumed gone forever contribute to a sense that there is much more to know about Babel, whose early fame with the publication of Red Cavalry in 1926 seemed to foretell a long and fruitful career. In the absence of [End Page 173] an archive, Gregory Freidin in his introduction compares Babel to the hackneyed Russian riddle inside an enigma, hence the title of this interdisciplinary volume. Comprising mainly essays presented at the Isaac Babel Workshop at Stanford University in 2004, the book is divided into three unequal parts: a short first section on Babel’s biography, a rich middle part on his works in their historical context, and a crowded third section on his stories in the context of world literature. Highlighting the complexities of what it meant for Babel to be a Jew from Odessa who wrote in Russian in the Soviet Union, the volume successfully demonstrates his centrality to European, Soviet, and Jewish literary and historical traditions. In Part One are essays by Patricia Blake and Freidin, both of whom are completing book-length biographies of Babel. Seeking evidence about Babel’s life in his own writing, their essays are by turns autobiographical as well. Blake tells a captivating story about her start as a Babel scholar in Moscow in 1962, when she was a journalist casting around for biographical sources while being tailed by a KGB motorcade. Freidin’s contribution is an account of the writer’s early influences and reference points, concluding with a reading of the play Maria, the last major new work published in Babel’s lifetime. Freidin, who organized the 2004 Babel Workshop, also invited theater director Carl Weber to stage a production of Babel’s Maria for the conference participants, and Weber’s statement about adapting the play for a contemporary American audience concludes the volume as a whole. Freidin and Weber’s essays stand on either side of the collection like bookends, reminders both of the value of reinterpretation and also of the event that occasioned the publication of the book itself. Parts Two and Three exceed expectations by providing a sustained and layered analysis of Babel as both a Jew and as a Soviet man participating in the creation of a new revolutionary culture. Reading Red Cavalry and Babel’s civil war diary for evidence of the Red Army’s attitudes toward the Jews, Oleg Budnitskii also examines press clippings and archival material to confirm that the antisemitism Babel documented as an “embedded” war reporter reached the highest levels of party, state, and army leadership. Similarly, Carol Avins offers a reading of “The Journey” as a record of the complex Jewish experience of the Russian Revolution. Babel occasionally concealed his own Jewishness behind an assumed name, while at the same time noting in his diary empathetic accounts of Jewish revolutionaries, and Avins reads a similar ambivalence in his story that has as its centerpiece the murder and mutilation of a Jew witnessed by a fellow Jew who narrowly escapes the same fate. Turning from the Jewish experience to the language of the Soviet state, Michael Gorham’s brilliant contribution juxtaposes Red Cavalry with Dmitrii Furmanov’s Chapaev, a [End Page 174] foundational text in the Soviet literary canon instrumental in developing a new revolutionary discourse. Concluding the section, Marietta Chudakova illuminates Babel’s impact on Soviet prose, arguing that diluted elements of his style became staples of Russian-language literature from the 1930s through the 1950s. Part Three asserts Babel’s place in the canon of world literary fiction, amassing an army of scholars to argue the importance of a relatively small body of work. Here Robert Alter situates Babel alongside luminaries like Tolstoy and Kafka in following Flaubert’s...

Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts (review)

Reviewed by: Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts David E. Goldberg Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts. Ed. Richard M. Reid. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-55849-739-9, 288 pp., cloth, $39.95. In recent years there has been a steady outpouring of works detailing the wartime experiences of surgeons responsible for treating the wounds of those injured in battle during the Civil War. However, Burt G. Wilder's Civil War diary is one of the first published accounts of a white surgeon in a black regiment. Edited by Richard M. Reid, Wilder's diary merits attention not only because of his unique position in the 55th Massachusetts but also because it draws us into the intellectual and social world of a white scientist devoted to the cause of social justice and racial equality for African Americans. Unlike many Union soldiers, whose attitudes toward African Americans were transformed as a result of their experiences in battle, Burt Wilder's diary consistently reveals a Civil War surgeon who devoted much of his professional life to publicly refuting the scientific racism of the period's leading thinkers. Burt Wilder's wartime recollections also remind us that the 54th Massachusetts was not the only black regiment to behave heroically in battle or suffer racial discrimination at the hands of white officers. The 55th Massachusetts was the first black regiment to fight in the siege of Charleston and saw combat on James Island, Honey Hill, and Orangeburg, South Carolina. In addition, Wilder's diary confirms aspects of the Civil War black experience told in other more recent accounts. Like many northern black regiments, African Americans in the 55th Massachusetts encountered discriminatory compensation policies that affected the group's morale and also led to verbal and physical altercations with white officers. At the same time, other entries show that while many African American soldiers received second-class medical attention during the Civil War, Wilder's presence allowed him to provide first-rate care to black soldiers and also enabled him to reprimand white officers who sought to send wounded black soldiers back into battle before their injuries had properly healed. The most interesting aspects of Wilder's diary, however, concern not his wartime writings, but his postwar project to counter the racist narratives of scientists, historians, and politicians during the era of national reconciliation. In 1909, Wilder spoke at the National Negro Conference to refute the assertion of Louis Agassiz, Samuel George Morton, and others that African Americans possessed physiologically inferior traits to white people. Praised by W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists, Wilder decided to compile and publish his wartime writings. In the spring of 1910, he traveled throughout the postwar South to revisit, recount, [End Page 285] and cross-reference the experiences and thoughts recorded in his wartime diary. Although he was never able to personally publish his diary, his wartime diaries and postwar career serve to introduce us to another white progressive whose public career as an advocate of racial justice helped complicate the publication of white racial narratives made popular throughout the early Jim Crow period. David E. Goldberg West Virginia University Copyright © 2012 The Kent State University Press

Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts (review)

Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts (review)

Mercurius Britanicus on Charles I: an exercise in civil war journalism and high politics, August 1643 to May 1646

This article examines in detail the sustained campaign of character assassination run by Mercurius Britanicus against Charles I. It illustrates the substance, style and provenance of Britanicus's arguments; it then assesses the newsbook's attacks in their chronological context. The article argues that Britanicus worked closely with the parliamentary war party grandees to discredit Charles publicly, to divide royalist opinion by revealing his weaknesses and mistakes, and to pressurize him into making peace on the radicals' terms. Although Britanicus stopped short of calling outright for Charles's deposition, this was the logical conclusion to be drawn from the newsbook's comments.

The Enigma of Isaac Babel: biography, history, context

The Enigma of Isaac Babel: Biography, History, Context, edited by Gregory Freidin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 288 pp. $60.00. The Enigma of Isaac Babel is infused with a sense of loss: Babel's manuscripts and correspondence were arrested with him, presumed lost in the wake of his execution at the age of forty-five. Laments of a life cut short, stories never written, and papers presumed gone forever contribute to a sense that there is much more to know about Babel, whose early fame with the publication of Red Cavalry in 1926 seemed to foretell a long and fruitful career. In the absence of an archive, Gregory Freidin in his introduction compares Babel to the hackneyed Russian riddle inside an enigma, hence the title of this interdisciplinary volume. Comprising mainly essays presented at the Isaac Babel Workshop at Stanford University in 2004, the book is divided into three unequal parts: a short first section on Babel's biography, a rich middle part on his works in their historical context, and a crowded third section on his stories in the context of world literature. Highlighting the complexities of what it meant for Babel to be a Jew from Odessa who wrote in Russian in the Soviet Union, the volume successfully demonstrates his centrality to European, Soviet, and Jewish literary and historical traditions. In Part One are essays by Patricia Blake and Freidin, both of whom are completing book-length biographies of Babel. Seeking evidence about Babel's life in his own writing, their essays are by turns autobiographical as well. Blake tells a captivating story about her start as a Babel scholar in Moscow in 1962, when she was a journalist casting around for biographical sources while being tailed by a KGB motorcade. Freidin's contribution is an account of the writer's early influences and reference points, concluding with a reading of the play Maria, the last major new work published in Babel's lifetime. Freidin, who organized the 2004 Babel Workshop, also invited theater director Carl Weber to stage a production of Babel's Maria for the conference participants, and Weber's statement about adapting the play for a contemporary American audience concludes the volume as a whole. Freidin and Weber's essays stand on either side of the collection like bookends, reminders both of the value of reinterpretation and also of the event that occasioned the publication of the book itself. Parts Two and Three exceed expectations by providing a sustained and layered analysis of Babel as both a Jew and as a Soviet man participating in the creation of a new revolutionary culture. Reading Red Cavalry and Babel's civil war diary for evidence of the Red Army's attitudes toward the Jews, Oleg Budnitskii also examines press clippings and archival material to confirm that the antisemitism Babel documented as an embedded war reporter reached the highest levels of party, state, and army leadership. …

A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher (review)

Reviewed by: A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher Matt Mason A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher. Edited by Jonathan W. White. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 294. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $28.00.) In 1967, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania published Nicholas B. Wainwright's very selective—but over six-hundred-page—edition of Sidney George Fisher's 1834–71 diary. In this new edition, Jonathan White offers us the Civil War years (1860–65), a selection that will prove useful especially to teachers. White has written a new introduction for this edition and amplified some of Wainwright's explanatory footnotes but otherwise preserved the text as Wainwright presented it. Accordingly, this edition's main contribution will likely be to the classroom. That contribution is of real value, as Fisher's journal provides an excellent resource for teachers interested in the Civil War home front. Fisher was an elite—and elitist—Philadelphian who consistently followed a moderate path in politics. Never a staunch antislavery man or dough-faced sympathizer with the South, both before and during the war he offered relatively disinterested observations on the sectional crisis and the political parties [End Page 511] caught in its vortex. (One exception to this rule is his consistent hatred of the Democratic Party in its various incarnations; from Thomas Jefferson to the Copperheads, he execrated Democrats as venal demagogues with no moral compass.) If this diary does not give us the picture of a doughface embracing the Republican Party evident in the antebellum diary entries of George Templeton Strong or Benjamin Brown French, Fisher does provide a host of neutral observations on public affairs in wartime Philadelphia. Those observations include a vivid picture of a polarized political world. Perhaps the leading theme in the diary is the extreme bitterness of Copperheads in his family and social circle. After every encounter with them, he recorded their rants against the Republican regime, painful as their passionate and extreme positions were to his moderate sensibilities. Of one relative, he wrote in 1863, "He is more violent than ever about the war and I really fear that his mental & bodily health will be seriously affected!" (179). On the other hand, he chronicled a series of mob actions against the most provocative antiwar Democrats, from 1861 to 1865 (84, 109–10, 189, 253–59). Fisher's observations here as elsewhere carry weight largely because he had no particular ax to grind in recording them. Another vital Civil War theme of Fisher's journal is how nonabolitionist northerners came to embrace first the Republican Party and then its emancipationist wartime agenda. Aside from his loathing of Democrats, Fisher was no natural-born Republican. But he noted approvingly in 1860, "the northern people are roused at length" behind the Republican platform, a development he ascribed to white southerners' "excesses and monstrous abuse of power" (20). Indeed, Fisher believed in and feared a slave power conspiracy, although he never used that phrase in the diary (64). After the firing on Fort Sumter and the mobbing of northern troops in Baltimore, even this inert gentleman caught a little war fever (86). Fisher also received much more complete information about southern slavery during the war, which turned him against it (158–59, 197, 202). Crucially, despite his knee-jerk opposition to the idea of black equality, he came to see the military value of black troops (198, 200, 245–46). He knew he was far from alone in this political journey: "The war has changed our notions in regard to slavery," he wrote in 1863, and "if we are not now abolitionists, . . . we are emancipationists & wish to see slavery destroyed since it has attempted to destroy the nation" (206). Moreover, his postwar reflections on the prospect of black equality bespeak the severe limits of most northerners' commitment to the most radical ideas for Reconstruction. [End Page 512] Nor are these the only significant themes Fisher's diary illustrates. For he recorded his thoughts on such perennial themes as early expectations of a short war giving way to determined fighting over the long haul, the character and leadership of Abraham...

Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary

Marching with the First Nebraska: A Civil War Diary