Lessons of War: The Civil War in Children's Magazines.

Lessons of War: The Civil War in Children's Magazines. Edited by James Marten. (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, A Scholarly Resources Inc. Imprint, 1999. Pp. xviii, 259. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8420-2656-8; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8420-2654-1.)

For several decades of this century, historians and war buffs seem to have forgotten that most wars are, in a sense, total. Battlefields were places for civilian pursuits before battles displaced or destroyed the everyday lives of civilians--especially women and children. Perhaps novels such as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five (New York, 1969) or television journalism's pictures of bombed towns have jarred contemporary scholars to remember the larger frameworks of war. James Marten's collection of the literature on the Civil War from children's magazines published 1861-65 makes available to general readers and students well-chosen selections from northern periodicals and the few southern ones that existed. This collection makes available writings by prominent authors of the period--including Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Lydia Maria Child, and Edmund Kirke--that, regrettably, now are difficult to access. It joins a growing literature on the impact of war on children and, in particular, of the Civil War on the domestic life of North and South.

The author prefaces his selections with descriptive commentaries on their main themes and the reasons for their inclusion. For a more sophisticated, extended discussion, Marten's The Children's Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1998) is useful. Marten arranges his selections so that readers learn how editors and authors of children's periodicals created a community of readers. Writers addressed children directly as their "dear readers" and tried to connect the exigencies of wartime to their lives. Children learned of war goals and the plight of "the contrabands." They read how to serve the war effort by studying hard, obeying their families, and enduring shortages. Marten's selections tell of children's play--boys marching about and girls making ambulances to rescue imaginary fallen soldiers (sometimes wounded neighborhood animals). War entered pastimes such as playacting and neighborhood newspaper publishing, and magazines helped it do so. Editors and writers encouraged children's war-mindedness even as they excluded depiction of war horrors from their publications.

Though Civil War scholars will welcome this collection of primary source material for their students' interest and research, the collection commentary and selection probably will not satisfy them completely. Marten does not discuss how editors intruded into the letters that they published or whether these letters were invented or edited to conform to their agenda. Insights from recent scholarly work might have inspired the modification of document selection. The history of books and reading would allow Marten to discuss children's reception of these didactic texts more perceptively. At least Marten might recognize that children's literature may reflect more what adult writers wanted children to think about the war than what children thought. In addition, scholarship on gender and the war and on gender and reading might have allowed Marten to see how adult authors adjusted gender conventions to wartime. Though Marten shows that northern and southern periodicals addressed race and slavery, these topics deserve more extended analysis. Clearly Marten has hit upon a rich vein for future historians to mine.

LOUISE L. STEVENSON

Franklin and Marshall College