| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William Blair. Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 206. $32.50.

One of the most welcome recent trends in Civil War scholarship is a shift toward local studies offering a more fully integrated view of the war years. Many such studies have progressed far beyond the familiar examinations of life on the home front as a counterpoint to action on the battlefield or policy making in the halls of the Union and Confederate governments. The most ambitious of them are social histories in the most complete sense of the term, portraits of particular places and the people who inhabited them, in all their complexity. Some scholars also touch on significant themes of the antebellum and postwar years as well while focusing on the war years as their major frame of reference. 1

Virginia, although one of the last southern states to secede, was without doubt the most significant of all of them during the war. It furnished not only a new national capital but also its immense agricultural, industrial, economic, and political resources and a large percentage of its white male population—including the Confederacy's most enduring heroes—to the war effort. As the scene of innumerable campaigns, battles, and smaller actions, furthermore, its very place names, from Manassas to Appomattox, create powerful images of the war years. In many ways, the story of Virginia's Confederate experience has been all but obscured by its mythic status since 1865, but no longer. . . .

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