Looking at the Civil War With New Eyes

Author Joan Cashin’s two recent books  

Union soldiers in trenches before the Battle of Petersburg, Virginia, on June 9, 1864. Shutterstock

This particular Veterans Day offers a time to reflect on another era when our nation was divided: the Civil War.

Civil War buff Jon Roll and I wondered about the effects of the Civil War on the civilians at the time, so we chose two recent books by Joan E. Cashin to review: her “War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War” and her more recent book, “War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era.”