This edited collection of Civil War correspondence between Col. Thomas Cahill and his wife, Margaret, offers a rare glimpse into the symbiotic relationship between soldiers and their home communities. In the only substantial extant collection of letters from an Irish American woman on the northern home front, Margaret's pivotal role as a go-between in the financial affairs of men in the regiment and their wives is made evident, as is the broader interplay between the community of New Haven, Connecticut, and the regiment. The couple's correspondence was nearly constant in their four years apart. There is an inherent intimacy in the way that daily life during the Civil War is documented and in particular in the gradual revelation of the emotional toll taken by a long-distance relationship. Because the volume includes letters from both Cahill and his wife, the interplay between the regiment and the home front is traced in a way most collections are not able to achieve. This lively correspondence provides a great introduction to primary source reading for students of the Civil War home front. These teaching opportunities will supplemented by a companion website that features more correspondence, maps, and additional learning materials.

Drawing on records of about 5,500 soldiers and veterans, Shades of Green traces the organization of Irish regiments from the perspective of local communities in Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin and the relationships between soldiers and the home front. Research on the impact of the Civil War on Irish Americans has traditionally fallen into one of two tracks, arguing that the Civil War either further alienated Irish immigrants from American society or that military service in defense of the Union offered these men a means of assimilation. In this study of Irish American service, Ryan W. Keating argues that neither paradigm really holds, because many Irish Americans during this time already considered themselves to be assimilated members of American society. This comprehensive study argues that the local community was often more important to ethnic soldiers than the imagined ethnic community, especially in terms of political, social, and economic relationships. An analysis of the Civil War era from this perspective provides a much clearer understanding of immigrant place and identity during the nineteenth century. With a focus on three regiments not traditionally studied, the author provides a fine-grained analysis revealing that ethnic communities, like other types of communities, are not monolithic on a national scale. Examining lesser-studied communities, rather than the usual those of New York City and Boston, Keating brings the local back into the story of Irish American participation in the Civil War, thus adding something new and valuable to the study of the immigrant experience in America's bloodiest conflict. Throughout this rich and groundbreaking study, Keating supports his argument through advanced quantitative analysis of military-service records and an exhaustive review of a massive wealth of raw data; his use of quantitative methods on a large dataset is an unusual and exciting development in Civil War studies. Shades of Green is sure to "shake up" several fields of study that rely on ethnicity as a useful category for analysis; its impressive research provides a significant contribution to scholarship.

Embroiled in the Civil War, northerners wrote and spoke with frequency about the subject of loyalty. The word was common in newspaper articles, political pamphlets, and speeches, appeared on flags, broadsides, and prints, was written into diaries and letters and the stationary they appeared on, and even found its way into sermons. Its ubiquity suggests that loyalty was an important concept...but what did it mean to those who used it? Contested Loyalty examines the significance of loyalty across fault lines of gender, social class, and education, race and ethnicity, and political or religious affiliation. These differing vantage points reveal the complicated ways in which loyalties were defined, prioritized, acted upon, and related. While most of the scholarly work on Civil War Era nationalism has focused on southern identity and Confederate nationhood, the essays in Contested Loyalty examine the variable, fluid constructions of these concepts in the north. Essays explore the limitations and incomplete nature of national loyalty and how disparate groups struggled to control its meaning. The authors move beyond the narrow partisan debate over Democratic dissent to examine other challenges to and competing interpretations of national loyalty. Today's leading and emerging scholars examine loyalty through: the frame of politics at the state and national level; the viewpoints of college educated men as well as the women they courted; the attitudes of northern Protestant churches on issues of patriotism and loyalty; working class men and women in military industries; how employers could use the language of loyalty to take away the rights of workers; and the meaning of loyalty in contexts of race and ethnicity. The Union cause was a powerful ideology committing millions of citizens, in the ranks and at home, to a long and bloody war. But loyalty to the Union cause imperfectly explains how citizens reacted to the traumas of war or the ways in which conflicting loyalties played out in everyday life. The essays in this collection point us down the path of greater understanding.

This edited collection of Civil War correspondence between Col. Thomas Cahill and his wife, Margaret, offers a rare glimpse into the symbiotic relationship between soldiers and their home communities. In the only substantial extant collection of letters from an Irish American woman on the northern home front, Margaret's pivotal role as a go-between in the financial affairs of men in the regiment and their wives is made evident, as is the broader interplay between the community of New Haven, Connecticut, and the regiment. The couple's correspondence was nearly constant in their four years apart. There is an inherent intimacy in the way that daily life during the Civil War is documented and in particular in the gradual revelation of the emotional toll taken by a long-distance relationship. Because the volume includes letters from both Cahill and his wife, the interplay between the regiment and the home front is traced in a way most collections are not able to achieve. This lively correspondence provides a great introduction to primary source reading for students of the Civil War home front. These teaching opportunities will supplemented by a companion website that features more correspondence, maps, and additional learning materials.