The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans collects and annotates a unique and little-known body of Civil War literature: narrative sketches, accounts, and poetry by veterans who lost the use of their right arms due to wounds sustained during the conflict and who later competed in left-handed penmanship contests in 1865 and 1866. Organized by William Oland Bourne, the contests called on men who lost limbs while fighting for the Union to submit "specimens" of their best left-handed "business" writing in the form of personal statements. Bourne hoped the contests would help veterans reenter the work force and become economically viable citizens. Following Bourne's aims, the contests commemorated the sacrifices made by veterans and created an archive of individual stories detailing the recently ended conflict. However, the contestants and their entries also present visible evidence-in the form of surprisingly elegant or understandably sloppy handwriting specimens-of the difficulties veterans faced in adapting to life after the war and recovering from its traumas. Their written accounts relate the chaos of the battlefield, the agony of amputation, and the highs and lows of recovery. Editor Allison M. Johnson organizes the selections thematically in order to highlight issues crucial to the experiences of Civil War soldiers, veterans, and amputees, offering invaluable insights into the ways in which former fighting men understood and commemorated their service and sacrifice. A detailed introduction provides background information on the contests and comments on the literary and historical significance of the veterans and their writings. Chapter subjects include political and philosophical treatises by veterans, amateur but poignant poetic testaments, and graphic accounts of wounding and amputation. The Left-Armed Corps makes accessible this archive of powerful testimony and creative expression from Americans who fought to preserve the Union and end slavery.

Beginning with a brief look at what the European colonists were able to make of indigenous beliefs and practices, and ending in 1730athe year before the first published work of the Rev. Jonathan Edwardsa Religion and Its Reformation in America seeks to highlight the distinguishing features of Christianity in the first century of its life in the colonies that would became the United States. The transplanted Church of England in Virginia, the Catholicism of Maryland, and, later on, the Quaker experience of Pennsylvania are well represented, but the heaviest emphasis falls on the "Puritans" of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Astonishingly, the leaders of a migrant population produced a religious literature that, in both quantity and intellectual acumen, is unmatched in any other colonial venue on record. Drawing on an array of texts written on the Continent, and in some cases on a personal experience of Reformed churches abroad, these so-called Puritans sought a New Church in a providentially provided New England. The general outlines of their storyaend-time excitement, the establishment of a radical new ecclesiology (which came to be known as Congregationalism), second- and third-generation confusion and compromise which yet refused to concede that their radicalism had been a mistakeaare well known to historians who specialize in this period. Presented here, however, for scholar and student alike, is something approaching a full literary recordanot just names and dates and creeds and platforms, but a rich human experience of motive, energy, action, and affect. Religion to be sure, with reform its driving forceabut also literature in its best sense, eager to upend prevailing assumptions.

The Left-Armed Corps: Writings by Amputee Civil War Veterans collects and annotates a unique and little-known body of Civil War literature: narrative sketches, accounts, and poetry by veterans who lost the use of their right arms due to wounds sustained during the conflict and who later competed in left-handed penmanship contests in 1865 and 1866. Organized by William Oland Bourne, the contests called on men who lost limbs while fighting for the Union to submit "specimens" of their best left-handed "business" writing in the form of personal statements. Bourne hoped the contests would help veterans reenter the work force and become economically viable citizens. Following Bourne's aims, the contests commemorated the sacrifices made by veterans and created an archive of individual stories detailing the recently ended conflict. However, the contestants and their entries also present visible evidence-in the form of surprisingly elegant or understandably sloppy handwriting specimens-of the difficulties veterans faced in adapting to life after the war and recovering from its traumas. Their written accounts relate the chaos of the battlefield, the agony of amputation, and the highs and lows of recovery. Editor Allison M. Johnson organizes the selections thematically in order to highlight issues crucial to the experiences of Civil War soldiers, veterans, and amputees, offering invaluable insights into the ways in which former fighting men understood and commemorated their service and sacrifice. A detailed introduction provides background information on the contests and comments on the literary and historical significance of the veterans and their writings. Chapter subjects include political and philosophical treatises by veterans, amateur but poignant poetic testaments, and graphic accounts of wounding and amputation. The Left-Armed Corps makes accessible this archive of powerful testimony and creative expression from Americans who fought to preserve the Union and end slavery.

In The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture, Allison M. Johnson considers the ubiquitous images of bodies- white and black, male and female, soldier and civilian- that appear throughout newspapers, lithographs, poems, and other texts circulated during and in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Rather than dwelling on the work of well-known authors, The Scars We Carve uncovers a powerful archive of Civil War- era print culture in which the individual body and its component parts, marked by violence or imbued with rhetorical power, testify to the horrors of war and the lasting impact of the internecine conflict. The Civil War brought about vast changes to the nation's political, social, racial, and gender identities, and Johnson argues that print culture conveyed these changes to readers through depictions of nonnormative bodies. She focuses on images portrayed in the pages of newspapers and journals, in the left-handed writing of recent amputees who participated in penmanship contests, and in the accounts of anonymous poets and storytellers. Johnson reveals how allegories of the feminine body as a representation of liberty and the nation carved out a place for women in public and political realms, while depictions of slaves and black soldiers justified black manhood and citizenship in the midst of sectional crisis. By highlighting the extent to which the violence of the conflict marked the physical experience of American citizens, as well as the geographic and symbolic bodies of the republic, The Scars We Carve diverges from narratives of the Civil War that stress ideological abstraction, showing instead that the era's print culture contains a literary and visual record of the war that is embodied and individualized.