$27.95
By Angela Esco Elder
This was a featured title for one of our Book Talks in 2022!
Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers. They recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications. In Love and Duty, Angela Esco Elder draws on these materials—as well as songs, literary works, and material objects like mourning gowns—to explore white Confederate widows’ stories, examining the records of their courtships, marriages, loves, and losses to understand their complicated relationship with the Confederate state.
Paperback: 224 Pages
Publisher: UNC Press
Description
Paperback: 224 Pages
Publisher: UNC Press
Dr. Angela Esco Elder is an Associate Professor of History at Converse University. She teaches various American history courses, including those in her specialty – the Civil War and women’s history. After graduating from the University of Georgia with a Ph.D. in History, she became the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech. Her dissertation, which explored the experience of Confederate widowhood, won the southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize and St.George Tucker Society’s Melvin E. Bradford Dissertation Prize in 2017. Dr.Elder has published a number of book chapters, encyclopedia articles, and book reviews.
Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers. They recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications. Elder shows how, in losing their husbands, many women acquired significant cultural capital, which positioned them as unlikely actors to gain political influence.
