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Interdisciplinary Studies of the Civil War Era: Recent Trends and Future Prospects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2016

MICHAEL E. WOODS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Marshall University. Email: woodsm@marshall.edu.

Abstract

Interdisciplinary scholarship on the era of the American Civil War has invigorated a well-trodden field. This essay addresses recent scholarship on the history of emotions, medicine, and the environment in the Civil War era, analyzing key themes and suggesting areas for future research. Together, these fields have added nuance to the “dark turn” in Civil War studies, historicized concepts often treated ahistorically, and allowed Civil War historians to engage in meaningful conversations with scholars in other fields and disciplines.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

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27 Steven E. Nash, “Love Is a Battlefield: Lizzie Alsop's Flirtation with the Confederacy,” in Berry, Weirding the War, 122–38.

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42 Adams, George Worthington, “Confederate Medicine,” Journal of Southern History , 6, 2 (May 1940), 151–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 151. The classic studies of Union and Confederate medicine are somewhat more hopeful, tracing organizational improvements and some advances in medical knowledge. See Adams, , Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: H. Schuman, 1952)Google Scholar; and Cunningham, H. H., Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

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71 Hurt, R. Douglas, Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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75 On this distinction see Brady, “From Battlefield to Fertile Ground,” 315. J. R. McNeill adds political environmental history as a third category, but it has not deeply influenced Civil War studies. McNeill, “Observations,” 6–9.

76 Fiege, Mark, “Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the American Civil War,” in Tucker, Richard P. and Russell, Edmund, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 93109 Google Scholar, 93, 104.

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