A Woman Doctor's Civil War: The Diary of Esther Hill Hawks (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)

ISBN 10: 0872496228 / ISBN 13: 9780872496224

Published by University of South Carolina Press, 1989

About this Item

Fast Free Shipping â Good condition. It may show normal signs of use, such as light writing, highlighting, or library markings, but all pages are intact and the book is fully readable. A solid, complete copy that's ready to enjoy.

Seller Inventory # GWV.0872496228.G

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Woman Doctor's Civil War: The Diary of Esther Hill Hawks (Women's Diaries and Letters of the South)
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0872496228
• ISBN 13: 9780872496224
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: good

About this title

Synopsis

A physician, a Northerner, a teacher, a school administrator, a suffragist, and an abolitionist, Esther Hill Hawks was the antithesis of Southern womanhood. And those very differences destined her to chronicle the era in which she played such a strange part.

While most women of the 1860s stayed at home, tending husband and house, Esther Hill Hawks went south to minister to black Union troops and newly freed slaves as both a teacher and a doctor. She kept a diary and described the South she saw―conquered but still proud. Her pen, honed to a fine point by her abolitionist views, missed mothing as she traveled through a hungary and ailing land.

In the well-known Diary from Dixie, Mary Boykin Chestnut depiced her native Southland as one of cavaliers with their ladies, statesmen and politicians, honor and glory. But Hawks painted a much different picture. And unlike Chestnut's characters, hers were liberated slaves and their hungary children, swaggering carpetbaggers, occupation troops far from home, and zealous missionaries. Revealed in the pages of this diary is a woman of vast energy, intelligence, and fortitude, who transformed her idealism into action.

About the Author

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Gerald Schwartz is a professor of history at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. A graduate of Mexico City College, Schwartz holds a PhD from Washington State University. His article, "An Integrated Free School in Civil War Florida," which also concerns the career of Dr. Esther Hill Hawks, appeared in The Florida Historical Quarterly.