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Zusatztext "A Fascinating and lively narrative"— The Christian Science Monitor "Thoroughly fascinating. . . . belongs on the bookshelf of all Civil War enthusiasts! right next to the biographies of Ulysses S. Grant! Jefferson Davis! and Mary Lincoln."— Jay Winik! author of April 1865 and The Great Upheaval "Using letters! books and other historical documents! Berkin paints a lively and empathetic picture of these women's lives."— St. Petersburg Times "A well written! highly accessible exploration of marriage and the cult of true womanhood as it played out in the lives of three southern women. Berkin's fascinating case studies . . . reveal the complex interplay out in the lives of southern women of the Civil War era."— Civil War Book Review Informationen zum Autor Carol Berkin received her A.B. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She taught at Baruch College from 1972 to 2008 and has taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York since 1983. She is currently Baruch Presidential Professor of History. Berkin is the author of Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence , A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution , Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist , First Generations: Women in Colonial America, and numerous articles and reviews. She lives in New York City and Guilford, Connecticut. Klappentext In these moving stories if Angelina Grimké Weld! wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld! Varina Howell Davis! wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis! and Julia Dent grant! wife of Ulysses S. Grant! Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories! taken together! help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts. One "WE ARE A NATION OF CHANGES" America at the Crossroads in the 1830s "it was the best of times. It was the worst of times." When Charles Dickens penned these now familiar words of contradiction, he was not speaking of the United States in 1830. Yet the contradiction surely applied, for during this turbulent decade Americans agreed that their country was changing rapidly. But whether the changes they witnessed were for the good or bad, they sharply disagreed. No one could deny that the nation was growing, both physically and in population. Eight new states had come into the Union since the century began and two more would join before the decade ended. The nation's population had soared, growing from under four million in 1790 to almost thirteen million by 1830. Although the great wave of German and Irish immigration lay ahead in the 1840s, roughly a hundred thousand new Americans would arrive in the United States before the decade was over. Yet if the nation was growing larger, there was a sense that it was also becoming more intimate, for a revolution in transportation and communication was in full swing. Toll roads crisscrossed the country, creating a transportation network unimagined in the eighteenth century. The heavily traveled National Road had snaked its way through the Appalachian Mountains since the 1820s, and by 1830 it reached as far as the Ohio River. Construction on a state-of-the-art highway soon followed, and by 1838 it carried people and produce as far as Illinois. A system of canals, including the famous Erie Canal, now linked the western countryside to the cities of the Northeast. Americans were already growing accustomed to the marvels of new technology, for since the late eighteenth century, steamboats with fanciful names such as Car of Neptune, Firefly, and Vesuvius could be seen on the Hudson, Delaware, and Savannah rivers. But an even faster, if noisier, form o...
