From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era

Timothy R. Mahoney is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author of River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest (Cambridge, 1990) and Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West (Cambridge, 1999). Collectively, this trilogy of books tells a comprehensive story of the transformations of the Midwest and nineteenth-century American society in general.

Part I. Hometown: 1. 'You are home folk' - hometown and the middle class; 2. 'What will become of our town?' - the rise and fall of the booster ethos, 1856–60; 3. 'Hard… and revolutionary times' - the crisis of the middle class, 1858–61; 4. 'God bless the good old town' - constructing trans-local communities in the 1850s; Part II. Battlefield: 5. 'It is all the talk in town' - the booster ethos and struggle for Main Street, 1860–1; 6. 'Almost sacred and hallowed ground' - civil war as spatial narrative; 7. 'The boys of 61' - the social order of company and regiment; 8. 'The 'inner' and 'outer' man' - encountering 'military ways and means'; 9. 'Civil war in our midst' - waging war at home and abroad, 1862–5; Epilogue - 'scattering to the four ends of the Earth' - 'the old town' and the middle class.