| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854–1877. By Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii, 372 pp. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-19-514654-7.)
Historians have produced countless studies of the American Civil War, but they only began examining the conflict's effects on ordinary people two decades ago. Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff's A People at War synthesizes much of that literature and supplements it with new research, providing a superb overview of what has become one of the most exciting fields in U.S. history.	1
Beginning with the rise of sectional conflict in the 1850s and concluding with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Nelson and Sheriff demonstrate not only that the war dramatically transformed the lives of soldiers and civilians, but also that these individuals helped shape the conflict's outcome. The authors question the traditional view of the war as a struggle between the North and the South, arguing instead that the battle over slavery divided not just the nation, but also communities and families. Finally, they show that the line separating military and civilian worlds sometimes vanished during the war, making it difficult to distinguish combatants from noncombatants.	. . .

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