6/12/2023 0 Comments Atlanta diarieWhile some journals and diaries were published almost immediately after the war’s end, it was in the mid-1870s that most memoirs began to be published, at rates that continued unabated until well after the turn of the twentieth century. Firsthand accounts in all these genres were written by soldiers as well as civilians, women as well as men, Blacks as well as whites, collectively offering a remarkably multifaceted view of how the war was perceived and felt by both Georgians and those brought to the state’s battlefronts and home fronts through a wide spectrum of circumstances.Ī significant number of these accounts have made their way into print over the century and a half since the Civil War ended, and in numbers unmatched by any other war in American history. Georgians were certainly among those for whom the war became a “written war,” and their accounts of what they experienced or observed took the form of letters of diaries and journals, with entries made on a fairly regular basis during the war and of memoirs and reminiscences, produced in hindsight, often many years after the war. In Patriotic Gore (1962), his classic study of Civil War (1861-65) literature, the literary critic Edmund Wilson asks, “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-1865 in which so many people were so articulate?” Historian Louis Masur later made the same point, stating that “the Civil War was a written war,” one in which hundreds of participants and observers “struggled to capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday.”
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