A generation at war

Nicole Etcheson

For all that has been written about the Civil War's impact on the urban northeast and southern home fronts, we have until now lacked a detailed picture of how it affected specific communities in the Union's Midwestern heartland. In this book the author offers a deeply researched micro history of one such community, Putnam County, Indiana, from the Compromise of 1850 to the end of Reconstruction, and shows how its citizens responded to and were affected by the war. Delving into the everyday life of a small town in one of the nineteenth century's bellwether states, this work considers the Civil War within a much broader chronological context than other accounts. It ranges across three decades to show how the issues of the day, particularly race and sectionalism, temporarily displaced economic and temperance concerns, how the racial attitudes of northern whites changed, and how a...