Victorian America and the Civil War

Anne C. Rose traces the impact of the Civil War on American culture through a collective biography of seventy-five men and women. Rose argues that at the heart of American Victorian culture was romanticism, a secular quest to answer questions previously settled by traditional religion. Focusing on elements of disequilibrium, passion and intellectual excitement. Victorian culture in America is shown to deviate widely from the standard conceptions of orderliness and moral self-assurance.In examining the biographies of seventy-five Americans who lived in the antebellum and Civil War eras, elements of disequilibrium, passion and intellectual excitement are explored in contrast to the traditional view of Victorian self-control and moral assurance.Anne Rose examines the relationship between American Victorian culture and the Civil War, arguing that Romanticism was at the heart of Victorian culture.Rose has managed to pack an impressive amount of material into the text....readers who make their way through it will be amply rewarded, as she has shed new light on the mid-nineteenth-century middle class. Rose has effectively set the Victorian generation in its historical context and shown how it was affected by the central event of the nineteenth century. Bill Cecil-Fronsman, North Carolina Historical ReviewRose's well-written study is both critical and empathetic in ways that will help us think more clearly about the time when the war came. Steven M. Stowe, Georgia Historical QuarterlyThe ideas set forth in her splendid introduction and elaborated in each chapter must be reckoned with in any future work on either the Civil War or Victorian Culture. Susan Curtis, American Historical ReviewNo summary can do justice to the rich insight, careful analysis, and historiographic sophistication of Rose's text....As a study of Victorian culture, this work cannot be surpassed. Reviews in American HistoryThis is a highly engaging and humane piece of cultural history, whose grea