Reading during the Civil War, Sarah Gardner

"Reading during the Civil War" pulls from Gardner's recent research on the the reading habits, practices, and choices of a people at war. The larger project asks not just what Confederates and Unionists read, but how and why they read. Drawing on diaries, private correspondence, inventories, and soldiers’ observations and recollections, she examines the reading habits and practices of distinct communities during the war. Northerners and Southerners did not merely respond to the circumstances of war and of eventual Confederate defeat. Rather, reading – how and what they read, the meanings that they ascribed to what they read, and the conditions that influenced their reading – shaped their understanding of the world around them. Sarah E. Gardner is Professor of History and Director of Southern Studies at Mercer University. She is the author of Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1867 and co-editor of Voices of the American South, an anthology of southern writing. This event is in conjunction with the Civil War 150 traveling exhibition hosted by Mercer University's Jack Tarver Library from October 13-November 3. Image credit: "Bombardment of Fort Sumter," print by Currier & Ives, ca. 1861. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC02881.15)