100 Books Like Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice

I love this book because it connects the military and the home fronts of the American Civil War. How, for example, specific battles were pursued and fought for the sake of public opinion and how, more generally, political priorities dictated military strategy.

The Confederacy was a slaveholders’ republic that had huge racial, social, and—indeed—gender divisions, which all worsened during the war, but Gallagher also shows how many white southerners, whether or not they owned enslaved people, united behind a Confederate nationalism focused on their equivalent of George Washington and the Continental Army of the American Revolution: Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. On this foundation, Confederates built their huge ambitions.

I love this book because it conjures up the restless spirit of the U.S. South in the 1850s on the eve of war. Forget the Gone with the Wind image of a refined southern aristocracy. Instead, conscious of slavery’s need to expand in order to survive, slaveholders were mobile hustlers determined to expand southwards into the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America.

The South needed more states and senators to compete with the North. With southern expansionist plans to acquire Cuba blocked by the northern majority, May brilliantly captures the desperation of what amounted to little more than raids of so-called filibusters on places like Nicaragua. For me, I love the context of all these plots and conspiracies: what amounts to a worldview looking south in which slaveholders’ ambitions would take off during the Civil War.

I love this book because Genovese puts a lifetime of research and scholarship into the service of searching for an answer to the question: how did slaveholders reconcile slavery and Christian faith? What results from this project is a stunning reconstruction of the mental furniture of the individuals who led the southern states into secession and war. Genovese uncovers what they learned at school, where they traveled, with whom they spoke and interacted, what they read, and what they thought about what they read.

What emerges is a distinct group of individuals who saw themselves as no one’s imitators and from whose understanding of history and the Bible regarded the white southerners they led as God’s chosen people. What kept them awake at night was the uneasy knowledge that this special status in the firmament would not necessarily protect them from God’s wrath. 

I love this book because nothing more perfectly proves the historian’s adage that the past is a foreign country; they did things differently there. Houghton understands the importance of mid-nineteenth century Great Britain’s cultural, economic, and social ascendancy in determining and understanding American attitudes from work to play, attitudes to class, race, taste in literature, and so on.

The ambition of wealth and power, which in the eighteenth century had destabilized the natural God-given order of things, was now seen as respectable and to be pursued. Weakness and poverty were now a source of shame and weakness. Above all, Houghton shows the importance of hero-worship to the generation coming of age in mid-nineteenth century, a cult of loyalty to a leader could exorcise the antisocial forces of class or individual ambition.

A hero could also act as a constraint on democracy in which the doctrines of liberty and democracy could… show more.

Thavolia Glymph analyzes the many ways that women—white and Black, enslaved and free, North and South—sought to promote or constrain the radical transformations promised by the Civil War. She interweaves well-known stories of white nurses and teachers and northern white feminists who labored to expand their claims on the nation with the lesser-known efforts of free, fugitive, and self-emancipated Black women and poor and working-class white women to ensure that the war led to greater liberty. Even some plantation mistresses became more politically active in efforts to impede Union military campaigns. This powerful book expands our concept of activism, forcing us to rethink its many meanings, sites, and goals in times of crisis. 

This is an excellent introduction to the varied experiences of women in the war, both those on active service as workers or volunteers, those who were victims of the war, fleeing their homes as refugees, and those who remained at home, carrying out domestic roles as wives and mothers in what were often difficult circumstances. It is a book I regularly recommend to my students. Although no book could cover all nations and contexts in a four-year global war, it shows not only how the war had an impact on millions of women’s lives, but also how women’s actions had significant impacts on the war and its legacies. It has a useful chronology of the war, and a good bibliography for further reading.

Kara Dixon Vuic’s Officer, Nurse, Woman reveals the lives and livelihoods of nurses in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war years. Through oral histories, she presents colorful anecdotes that make one laugh, shudder, and cry. In addition to lively stories, Vuic shows the Army’s contradictory treatment of and expectations toward women, their gender, and their sexuality. For example, recruitment materials for women as nurses promised both adventure and a secure career path, including equal pay as their male counterparts. Yet, women in the military also faced sexism, harassment, and assault with little means of recourse. Both a fun and challenging read, Officer, Nurse, Woman urges readers to consider gendered assumptions that continue to shape military policy today.

Readers are Dianne and her husband Don have been personal friends for many years. Like many people, I was deeply saddened by her untimely death last year. Dianne had a wonderfully fluent written style, so easy to read, and could capture a moment like few others. Her book gives insights into wartime life and the role of women in the early 19th Century in Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto (the York), as well as in Washington DC and Philadelphia. While the men did the fighting, the women backed them up – on the frontier, quite literally. A fascinating book written with passion and insight.

I was utterly engrossed by this amazing collection of Red Army women’s recollections, awed by the way they fought against enemy troops as well as misogynists and rapists in their own ranks.

These women were some of the toughest on the planet. They were not given proper uniforms until late in the war; they had the least training and often flew or fought in the most dangerous missions. I breathlessly read about their daring and bravery and became consumed with rage when I read about how their war service became tainted after the war.

Smeared as promiscuous because of their life at the front, many decorated heroines hid their medals in shame. This is a unique look at PTSD and the trauma of reintegration from the perspective of women warriors. 

If this book doesn’t compel you to become a feminist, then you probably don’t have a heart. Or if you have, then it is likely as cold as the rapists’ described in it. 

What do you feel when you read yet another account of mass rape, the trafficking, torture, and abuse of girls and women, and the gang rape of innocents? You should feel anger, if not despair. You might also well wonder what is wrong with men to make them behave this way.

Of course, you can choose not to read such accounts. But really, that is the coward’s way out. This is why this book is on my list–to challenge you to read it from start to finish and then, at the conclusion, decide you are not a feminist.