So Conceived and So Dedicated - (North's Civil War) by Lorien Foote & Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (Paperback)

About the Book

This collection of scholarly essays blends intellectual with social and cultural history to provide fresh insights into life in the Civil War Era North. Contributors offer interpretations for those interested in the study of medicine, law, race, ethnicity and identity, art, nationalism, and education.

Book Synopsis

Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War-era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union.

Broadly defining "intellectuals" to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed.

Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about, experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners' conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state?

Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war.

Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation's intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.

Review Quotes

"A study bringing together new work on the Civil War's impact on intellectual life in the North is long overdue. Foote and Wongsrichanalai have produced one of those rare edited collections: timely, coherent, intellectually satisfying, and filled with field-defining research. It is wonderful to see this topic finally covered in such fascinating and diverse ways."-----Frances Clarke, University of Sydney

The Civil War and Reconstruction has been called the second American revolution, and this fascinating collection reminds us that this era revolutionized American thought and culture. From medicine to education, from perception to memory, So Conceived and So Dedicated opens our eyes and minds to how Americans at the time saw and thought about what the Civil War meant to them.-----Michael Green, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

About the Author

Lorien Foote (Edited By)
Lorien Foote is professor of history at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Ohio University Press, 2003) and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York University Press, 2010), which was named honorable mention for the Lincoln Prize in 2011.

Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (Edited By)
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of history at Angelo State University. He is co-editor (with Lorien Foote) of So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War-Era North, also from Fordham University Press.