Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780871407818)

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans-- tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions-- tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche.

In the model of twenty-first-century histories like Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering or Maya Jasanoff 's Liberty's Exiles that illuminate the plight of the common man, Marching Home makes almost unbearably personal the rage and regret of Union veterans. Their untold stories are critically relevant today.

Author: Brian Matthew Jordan
ISBN-10: 0871407817
ISBN-13: 9780871407818
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 01/26/2015
Pages: 384
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/15/2014 pg. 98
Publishers Weekly 11/10/2014
Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2014
Choice 06/01/2015