| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, editors. An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front. (The North's Civil War Series, number 18.) New York: Fordham University Press. 2002. Pp. xx, 362. $45.00.

The essays that Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller have assembled here form a book much stronger than the average collection on the Civil War. The reason for the book's superiority is that many of the essays derive from unpublished dissertations rather than from conference papers and therefore represent the fruits of substantial research and long reflection. Some of the better contributions are now available in full-length books by the authors. This is true, for example, of Melinda Lawson's "Let the Nation Be Your Bank: The Civil War Bond Drives and the Construction of National Patriotism," now published in substance in Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (2002). Wherever you can read Lawson's work on this question, do so. Lawson provides an eye-opening appreciation of Jay Cooke's famous Civil War government bond selling drive, which offered a self-interested version of patriotism in contrast with the traditional version emphasizing self-sacrifice. Another good essay, Alice Fahs's "A Thrilling Northern War: Gender, Race, and Sensational Popular War Literature," finds in the pulp writing rather than in the distinguished fiction of the era unconventional roles for African Americans and women. The same territory is now covered in Fahs's The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (2001).

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