This Will Make a Man of Me
This Will Make a Man of Me

Author: James M. Scythes

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-07-19

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1611462193

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This book offers a unique firsthand account of the experiences of a teenage officer in America’s Civil War. Second Lieutenant Thomas James Howell was only seventeen years old when he received his commission to serve the 3rd New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Featuring sixty-five letters that Howell wrote home to his family, this book describes soldier life in the Army of the Potomac during the spring and summer of 1862, focusing on Howell’s experiences during Major General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign. Howell’s letters tell the story of a young man coming of age in the army. He wrote to his mother and siblings about the particular challenges he faced in seeking to earn the respect of both the men he commanded and his superiors. Unfortunately, however, the young lieutenant’s life was cut short in his very first combat experience when he was struck in the abdomen by a cannonball and nearly torn in two during the Battle of Gaines’ Mill. This book records Howell’s tragic story, and it traces his distinctive perception of the Civil War as a vehicle enabling him to transition into manhood and to prove his masculinity.

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy

Author: Christopher Grasso

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 019754732X

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"Teacher, preacher, soldier, spy: the civil wars of John R. Kelso is an account of an extraordinary nineteenth-century American life. A schoolteacher and Methodist preacher in Missouri, in the Civil War Kelso earned fame fighting rebel guerrillas. Seeking personal revenge as well as defending the Union, he vowed to slay twenty-five rebels with his own hand, and when he did so he was elected to Congress. In the House of Representatives during Reconstruction, he was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. After his term in Congress, personal tragedy drove him west, where he became a freethinking lecturer and author, an atheist, a Spiritualist, and, before his death in 1891, an anarchist. John R. Kelso was many things. He was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. The Civil War remained central to his life, challenging his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature. Throughout his life, too, he fought private wars-not only against former friends and alienated family members, rebellious students and disaffected church congregations, political opponents and religious critics, but also against the warring impulses in his own complex character. His life story moreover, offers a unique vantage upon dimensions of nineteenth-century American culture that are usually treated separately: religious revivalism and political anarchism; sex, divorce, and Civil War battles; freethinking and the Wild West"--

Polar Hayes
Polar Hayes

Author: Douglas W. Wamsley

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13:

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In the mid-19th century, Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes was a member of the Amer. arctic expedition under the command of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane in search of the lost British explorer Sir John Franklin. Through his own hard fought experiences, combined with the knowledge learned from Polar Eskimos, he successfully influenced the course of Arctic discovery. As an elected politician in New York State during its Gilded Age, Hayes served the 'public good' for a decade, with accomplishments as far reaching as his Arctic service. In this book, the story emerges of a remarkable but forgotten explorer, writer, politician, and humanitarian who epitomized the rugged and restless spirit of adventure and individualism of 19th-century America. Illustrations.