From a Q & A about the book at her publisher's website:
Q: There seems no end to books about the American Civil War. What does The Long Shadow of the Civil War offer that is new?Read the complete Q & A.
A: Although Civil War books about the home front are not new, this is a new sort of home front study that focuses on three communities from three different states.Rather than close with the war and Reconstruction, The Long Shadow of the Civil War follows individual Unionists and multiracial families into the New South era and, in some cases, into the twentieth century. This historical sweep allows the reader to understand the ongoing effects of the war at its most personal levels.
Q: What led you to combine three Civil War home fronts, all noted as areas of violent disorder, in one study? Why these three?
A: Most basically, I combined them in order to provide in-depth comparisons of the communities within the same volume. But there's more to it than that; the communities have important links to one another. The North Carolina Piedmont was the ancestral seedbed of migration into what became Jones County, Mississippi. Later, East Texas attracted many non-slaveholding Mississippi families seeking a less-developed piney woods region.
All three regions exhibited fierce Unionist activity during the Civil War, with brothers fighting in separate deserter bands across state lines in two of the communities. So, combining them in one study provided a wonderful opportunity to identify common characteristics of Southern Unionism, while also showing how different geographic settings influenced the nature of the inner civil wars.
Visit Victoria Bynum's website and blog.
--Marshal Zeringue