Faust, Mothers Of Invention - Women Of The Slaveholding South In The American Civil War

Abstract

In an award-winning new book, Drew Gilpin Faust provides another side to the Civil War: the experiences of slaveholding women in the South. After mining the diaries, letters, essays, memoirs, fiction, and poetry of more than 500 Confederate women, Faust pledged herself to writing an accessible yet scholarly work on this important topic. "After two decades as an academic historian, I sometimes fear I no longer can communicate in a manner that will engage a general reader," she writes, "but the compelling nature and human drama of this war story have made me want to try." The results are happy ones for teachers, as this is a volume that will overcome the usual undergraduate resistance to serious monographs.