This volume analyzes the cultural and intellectual impact of the war, considering how it reshaped Americans' spiritual, cultural, and intellectual habits. The Civil War engendered an existential crisis more profound even than the changes of the previous decades. Its duration, scale, and intensity drove Americans to question how they understood themselves as people. The chapters in the third volume distinguish the varied impacts of the conflict in different places on people's sense of themselves. Focusing on particular groups within the war, including soldiers, families, refugees, enslaved people, and black soldiers, the chapters cover a broad range of ways that participants made sense of the conflict as well as how the war changed their attitudes about gender, religion, ethnicity, and race. The volume concludes with a series of essays evaluating the ways Americans have memorialized and remembered the Civil War in art, literature, film, and public life.
Part I. Values: 1. Wartime masculinities James J. Broomall; 2. Northern women and the Civil War Nina Silber; 3. Southern women and the Civil War Sarah E. Gardner; 4. Religion in the Civil War era Timothy L. Wesley; 5. Economic and social values in the Civil War Brian P. Luskey; Part II. Social Experience: 6. Families in the Civil War James Marten; 7. Refugees and movement in the Civil War David Silkenat; 8. Citizen soldiers Susannah J. Ural; 9. Immigrant America and the Civil War David T. Gleeson; 10. Emancipation and war Yael A. Sternhell; 11. The black military experience Joseph P. Reidy; 12. Motives and morale Paul A. Cimbala; 13. Urban and rural America in the Civil War Frank Towers; Part III. Outcomes: 14. Making peace Elizabeth R. Varon; 15. Reconstruction during the Civil War Mark Wahlgren Summers; 16. Veterans and the postwar world Barbara A. Gannon; 17. The Civil War and the American state Gregory P. Downs; 18. The Civil War and American law Christian G. Samito; 19. The Civil War in visual art David C. Ward; 20. The Civil War in American thought Peter S. Carmichael; 21. The Civil War in literary memory John Casey; 22. The Civil War in film Craig A. Warren; 23. The Civil War in public memory Caroline E. Janney.
