Lessons of War: The Civil War in Childern's Magazines

For farm children near the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pa., and Spotsylvania, Va., the Civil War was an exercise in personal terror. For affluent New Yorkers such as seven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, it was more abstract: a distant, glamorous altercation between dashing Confederate uncles and the Union armies backed by the majority of Manhattan Roosevelts, most of whom managed to avoid service. Less-wealthy children of the same city found the war a mysterious, heartless vacuum into which their fathers too often vanished. And for a black adolescent in Alabama, the years 1861-65 were nothing but a long wait for deliverance--a wait made more tedious and painful by the deprivations of the Confederacy's war-ravaged economy. Drawing on diaries, memoirs and school records, Marquette University history professor Marten (Texas Divided: Loyalty and Dissent in the Lone Star State, 1856-1874) gives us these stories and more as he explores the various ways children (black and white, rich and poor, male and female, North and South) encountered and understood the war. Through his absorbing first-rate social history, Marten sheds much-needed light on a previously neglected aspect of Civil War history. In the process, he reveals the ways in which the war shaped an entire generation of American youth, for good and for ill. (Sept.) FYI: Marten also edited Lessons of War: The Civil War in Children's Magazines due in November from SR Books (104 Greenhill Ave., Wilmington, Del. 19805-1897), paper $18.95 150p ISBN 0-8420-2656-8).