A01=James J. Broomall
American Civil War
Army of Northern Virginia
Author_James J. Broomall
Category=JBSF2
Category=JMG
Category=JWXV
Category=NHWR3
Citizen-soldier
combat
cultural performance
demobilization
depression
diaries and letters
E. Porter Alexander
Eastern theater of the American Civil War
Edmund Kirby-Smith
emotional communities
emotional expression
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender
George Anderson Mercer
hunting
John W. Daniel
Josiah Gorgas
Ku Klux Klan
masculinity
material culture
military history
Reconstruction
Robert E. Lee
slaveholding families
southern history
southern honor
the long-term effects of war
uniforms
William J. Clarke
Product details
- ISBN 9781469651989
- Weight: 365g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 11 Mar 2019
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together-all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt.
Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.
Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.
James J. Broomall is assistant professor of history at Shepherd University and director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War.
