The Imagined Civil War

The Civil War inspired a remarkable outpouring of popular literature. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a torrent of war-related works, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Mining these rich but long-neglected sources, Alice Fahs demonstrates that instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals--including African Americans--to the nation.

Alice Fahs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.