19th-century Alabama
A01=Elizabeth Lipscomb
A01=Mary Johnston
Alabama heritage
Author_Elizabeth Lipscomb
Author_Mary Johnston
Category=DNB
Category=JBSF1
civil war
Civil War civilian experience
Civil War family narrative
Confederate history and home front
confederate states of america
csa
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
higher education
historical women leaders
Josiah Gorgas
libraries
library science
Reconstruction-era South
southeastern united states
Southern librarianship history
Southern resilience and womanhood
Southern women's history
tuscaloosa
university of alabama
University of Alabama history
us postal service
William Crawford Gorgas
women's biographies of the South
women's history
women's studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780817312343
- Weight: 333g
- Dimensions: 135 x 220mm
- Publication Date: 19 Aug 2003
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A daughter of John Gayle (lawyer and political leader who was governor of Alabama from 1831 to 1835), the devoted wife of Josiah Gorgas (chief of ordnance for the Confederacy), and the loving mother of William Crawford Gorgas (surgeon-general of the United States Army) and five other children – Amelia Gayle Gorgas (1826-1913) was all these things and a fascinating person in her own right – an antebellum Southern woman who made the transition to postbellum life and survived the difficult readjustments of the defeated South. Her biography is not just another account of a hero’s daughter, wife, or mother. It presents both the life of an individual who was herself a most attractive and appealing person and a captivating picture of the segment of nineteenth-century American society within which she moved. The authors skillfully avoid overdramatizing their heroine – though she lived in dramatic times – and emphasize the strength, flexibility, and resiliency that characterized so many of the purportedly fragile, helpless Southern women of her generation. IN turn, Amelia adapted herself readily to the relative prosperity of her early married life as wife of a United States Army officer in Maine, to the tensions and dangers of the Confederate capital Richmond during the Civil War, to the struggle to make a new life in the economically depressed South in the period immediately after the war, and to the postwar pleasures and problems of academic communities at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. As told by Mary Tabb Johnston and Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb, the life-story of this extraordinary woman is a delightful, fast-moving narrative indeed – a “good read” for young and old alike. The authors’ scholarship is extensive and penetrating, and yet their style is as graceful and enticing as their subject.
