| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Peter S. Carmichael. The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion. (Civil War America.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 343. $39.95.
Recently Civil War historiography has entered into an era where a blurring of the lines between military and social history has opened the field to a broad spectrum of subjects and methodologies. While this book is certainly more social history than military history, author Peter S. Carmichael provides an important contribution to both subfields and in doing so enhances the reader's appreciation of the Civil War as the nation's seminal event.	1
Carmichael examines the lives of 121 Virginians born between 1830 and 1842. Well educated and well heeled, these young men stood poised to become Virginia's greatest generation. Instead, they became the Commonwealth's last generation: the last generation to come of age in antebellum Virginia. Through a skillful use of primary sources generated by his subjects, Carmichael dispels the notion that these Virginians were wild-eyed, reckless rebels bent on the destruction of the Union solely for the sake of enslaving other men. Instead, Carmichael's young Virginians come forward as constitutionalists, intellectuals, and idealistic antebellum progressives who held an "extraordinarily optimistic view of progress" despite warnings from their elders to restrain their impulses toward modernization (pp. 23–24).	. . .

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