Nature's Civil War

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Release : 2013-11-11
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 779/5 ( reviews)

Nature's Civil War - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Nature's Civil War write by Kathryn J. Shively. This book was released on 2013-11-11. Nature's Civil War available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In the Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula Campaigns of 1862, Union and Confederate soldiers faced unfamiliar and harsh environmental conditions--strange terrain, tainted water, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, interminable rain and snow storms, and oppressive heat--which contributed to escalating disease and diminished morale. Using soldiers' letters, diaries, and memoirs, plus a wealth of additional personal accounts, medical sources, newspapers, and government documents, Kathryn Shively Meier reveals how these soldiers strove to maintain their physical and mental health by combating their deadliest enemy--nature. Meier explores how soldiers forged informal networks of health care based on prewar civilian experience and adopted a universal set of self-care habits, including boiling water, altering camp terrain, eradicating insects, supplementing their diets with fruits and vegetables, constructing protective shelters, and most controversially, straggling. In order to improve their health, soldiers periodically had to adjust their ideas of manliness, class values, and race to the circumstances at hand. While self-care often proved superior to relying upon the inchoate military medical infrastructure, commanders chastised soldiers for testing army discipline, ultimately redrawing the boundaries of informal health care.

An Environmental History of the Civil War

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Release : 2020-02-20
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 39X/5 ( reviews)

An Environmental History of the Civil War - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook An Environmental History of the Civil War write by Judkin Browning. This book was released on 2020-02-20. An Environmental History of the Civil War available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But here Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact. As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale. And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks. In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Fighting Means Killing

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Release : 2020-10-05
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 860/5 ( reviews)

Fighting Means Killing - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Fighting Means Killing write by Jonathan M. Steplyk. This book was released on 2020-10-05. Fighting Means Killing available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. “War means fighting, and fighting means killing,” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared. The Civil War was fundamentally a matter of Americans killing Americans. This undeniable reality is what Jonathan Steplyk explores in Fighting Means Killing, the first book-length study of Union and Confederate soldiers’ attitudes toward, and experiences of, killing in the Civil War. Drawing upon letters, diaries, and postwar reminiscences, Steplyk examines what soldiers and veterans thought about killing before, during, and after the war. How did these soldiers view sharpshooters? How about hand-to-hand combat? What language did they use to describe killing in combat? What cultural and societal factors influenced their attitudes? And what was the impact of race in battlefield atrocities and bitter clashes between white Confederates and black Federals? These are the questions that Steplyk seeks to answer in Fighting Means Killing, a work that bridges the gap between military and social history—and that shifts the focus on the tragedy of the Civil War from fighting and dying for cause and country to fighting and killing.

War Upon the Land

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Release : 2012-04-01
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 838/5 ( reviews)

War Upon the Land - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook War Upon the Land write by Lisa M. Brady. This book was released on 2012-04-01. War Upon the Land available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In this first book-length environmental history of the American Civil War, Lisa M. Brady argues that ideas about nature and the environment were central to the development and success of Union military strategy. From the start of the war, both sides had to contend with forces of nature, even as they battled one another. Northern soldiers encountered unfamiliar landscapes in the South that suggested, to them, an uncivilized society's failure to control nature. Under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan, the Union army increasingly targeted southern environments as the war dragged on. Whether digging canals, shooting livestock, or dramatically attempting to divert the Mississippi River, the Union aimed to assert mastery over nature by attacking the most potent aspect of southern identity and power--agriculture. Brady focuses on the siege of Vicksburg, the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, and events along the Mississippi River to examine this strategy and its devastating physical and psychological impact. Before the war, many Americans believed in the idea that nature must be conquered and subdued. Brady shows how this perception changed during the war, leading to a wider acceptance of wilderness. Connecting environmental trauma with the onset of American preservation, Brady pays particular attention to how these new ideas of wilderness can be seen in the creation of national battlefield memorial parks as unaltered spaces. Deftly combining environmental and military history with cultural studies, War upon the Land elucidates an intriguing, largely unexplored side of the nation's greatest conflict.

War Is All Hell

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Release : 2021-05-28
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 043/5 ( reviews)

War Is All Hell - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook War Is All Hell write by Edward J. Blum. This book was released on 2021-05-28. War Is All Hell available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. "An examination of how Americans brought concepts of the devil, demons, and hell into every fabric of their lives and times in the American Civil War. These influences continued to impact the nation and its people after the war"--