Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War.

Edited by William Blair and William Pencak. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xx], 332. $35.00, ISBN 0-271-02079-2.)

Editors William Blair and William Pencak have selected ten essays to suggest new ways to explore Pennsylvania's history and its importance as a site for additional research on the American Civil War. They intend their collection as a corrective to the undervalued significance of Pennsylvania (the battle of Gettysburg excepted) in Civil War historiography. The book achieves these goals with varying degrees of success.

One of the book's strengths is its inclusion of authors whose work encompasses widely divergent perspectives. Christian B. Keller opens the volume by exploring the reasons why men fought. His work upholds conclusions reached by James M. McPherson and Reid Mitchell, who have gleaned ideological and political reasons for enlisting from the letters of both northern and southern soldiers. However, in his examination of some of the approximately 2,000 southern sympathizers in Pennsylvania, Keller has found that a number of men chose the Confederate cause because of financial and personal ties (such as marital allegiance) to the South.

In her analysis of Ladies' Aid Societies in Pennsylvania, Rachel Filene Seidman, like other historians of women and gender, broadens the definition of political action to include the ways people distribute and contest power in their daily social interactions. Seidman also examines the effect of the war on women's lives and enters the debate over the extent to which the Civil War altered notions of appropriate roles for women. She argues that women became politicized, took pride that their work directly aided the federal government, and fundamentally reshaped their self-perceptions and their relationships to their local communities.

In a very different but equally valuable essay, Eric Ledell Smith enriches the literature on the role of African Americans in the Civil War and, specifically, the motivations of African American soldiers. He has collected and commented on letters sent to the Christian Recorder (a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church) from John C. Brock, who served in the 43rd Regiment of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the Overland campaign of 1864. Aside from providing insight into the service of black soldiers, these letters (several of which could be employed effectively in the classroom) reveal Brock's sense of his place in the war and in history.

Other noteworthy essays in the volume examine old topics in new ways. Elizabeth Milroy's subject is the Great Central Sanitary Fair at Philadelphia in June 1864, and she reveals how artists and purveyors of artwork used that cultural medium to instill patriotism. Barbara A. Gannon investigates Pennsylvania's Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) posts in the late nineteenth century, where she finds compelling evidence of interracial activity and concludes that African Americans used the GAR as a means of advancing their goal of equal citizenship. Several contributions return to the battle of Gettysburg but with lenses focused on cultural representations of that turning point of the war. For example, the concluding chapter, by editor William Blair, effectively analyzes how one art form, film, discloses public perceptions of past events. In his analysis of the 1993 movie Gettysburg, Blair convincingly argues that the nineteenth-century notion of the Civil War as a "brothers' war" persists today.

In attempting to cover a broad spectrum of historical interpretations and topics, editors Blair and Pencak have produced a collection that is rich but uneven. The essays are not all equally compelling. However, more than half of the selections actively engage current historical debates or raise significant questions for future inquiry. This volume certainly suggests starting points for anyone interested in Pennsylvania's role in the Civil War, and it also demonstrates that the war is not the unique preserve of historians of the South.

CYNTHIA M. KENNEDY
Clarion University of Pennsylvania