(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In early 1960s, centennial reflections and observances of American Civil War, especially its deeper significance in national self-understanding, were largely overshadowed by looming presence of Cold War and recent memory of World War II. The young American veterans of 1940s global war in Africa, Europe, and Asia were now running country, leaning into future, and had adopted habit of relative silence about their personal memories of war. If their families had been in United States by 1860s, their grandparents would have known first-hand Civil War generation, former soldiers from both armies and, depending on where they had lived, perhaps they also knew sharecroppers or new north-bound laborers who were born into slavery.The family lore handed down to World War II by parents and grandparents would have insisted that the generation had already been determined a century before. Much of hundredth anniversary of Civil War, therefore, as those of us who were of school-age or older may recollect, was mainly festive, summarized by band-leader Mitch Miller's television chorus singing mid-nineteenth century hymns in musical arrangements that sounded like popular show tunes.The sesquicentennial of Civil War, however, from distance gained by twenty-first century, encourages a comparatively larger in-depth consideration of first greatest generation's lived experience. The field of study centered on 1860s today has exploded into an inexhaustible list and interpretation of fresh topics. The books coming to press now are more comprehensive than ever imagined by an older that was not very far removed from days of case-study battles, eccentric generals, and great political actors. Sean A. Scott's A Visitation of God , a cellular-level examination of a particular geography, its practices of piety, and frequent collision on home front between political positions and religious values, is a model of this important break-through in historiography. In addition, his work aims at a growing cross-over audience that allows general readers and specialists an equal share of profitable reading.Scott considers perspective of Civil War through personal letters, diaries, and news accounts by those left behind to run farms, businesses, households, and churches as their sons, fathers, brothers, and friends entered military service. He is looking for a different set of clues than similar primary sources have yielded other writers. Rather, he discovers that psychological tensions and complex spiritual life within religious institutions are more profound, confusing, and shifting than many students, who are accustomed to neatly drawn boundaries, may expect. Scott takes a new direction, away from mainstream focus on sermons, conditions of faith in soldier camps, or contextual theology that suggests Civil War really started in 1850s as an exegetical crisis and was largely an extension of that unbridgeable bifurcation in national pulpits.Scott's book is not a wide-angle study of all states in Union. He differentiates Northern from New England, Western, and Mid-Atlantic regions, so that small towns and prairie homes he explored are only in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa (seven states out of Union's twenty-five). …
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Apr 23, 2014
Enrique Muriel-Torrado + 1
Open Access
