I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over: First-Person Accounts of Civil War Arkansas from the Arkansas Historical Quarterly (The Civil War in the West) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557286477 ISBN 13: 9781557286475

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press, 2014

Synopsis

I Do Wish this Cruel War Was Over collects diaries, letters, and memoirs excerpted from their original publication in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly to offer a first-hand, ground-level view of the war's horrors, its mundane hardships, its pitched battles and languid stretches, even its moments of frivolity. Readers will find varying degrees of commitment and different motivations among soldiers on both sides, along with the perspective of civilians. In many cases, these documents address aspects of the war that would become objects of scholarly and popular fascination only years after their initial appearance: the guerrilla conflict that became the "real war" west of the Mississippi; the "hard war" waged against civilians long before William Tecumseh Sherman set foot in Georgia; the work of women in maintaining households in the absence of men; and the complexities of emancipation, which saw African Americans winning freedom and sometimes losing it all over again. Altogether, these first-person accounts provide an immediacy and a visceral understanding of what it meant to survive the Civil War in Arkansas.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark K. Christ is community outreach director at the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program and the editor or author of many books on the Civil War, including, most recently, Civil War Arkansas, 1863: The Battle for a State.

Review:

"The value of original materials such as these is that they allow long dead participants to reach out once again to tell the reader what the civil war in Arkansas was really like." —Bobby Roberts, Central Arkansas Library System

"A vibrant word picture of a war that was fought in less familiar locales by protagonists from an unfamiliar society."
—America's Civil War

“Expertly curated... provides an interesting introduction to Civil War Arkansas, and it shines light on a variety of contemporary perspectives.”

—Journal of Southern History, November 2015

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1557286477
• ISBN 13: 9781557286475
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Christ Mark K., Williams Patrick G.