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<p>Abstract:</p><p>This historiographical essay looks at the concept of the so-called common soldier of the Civil War, as it has evolved in the writing of scholarly and popular historians since the Second World War. It organizes the historiography into three eras, the first defined by Bell Wiley's books about "Johnny Reb" (1943) and "Billy Yank" (1952). The second era, commencing after the Vietnam war, saw challenges to Wiley's interpretation of Civil War soldiers as essentially nonideological and began to incorporate statistical analysis to supplement traditional interpretive techniques. In the twenty-first century, historians of the dark turn era have made increasing use of digital tools while continuing to examine aspects of soldiers' aggregated experiences. The essay concludes that the next direction for the field may be to abandon the "common soldier" construct and to focus on the political, regional, generational, ethnic, religious, racial, and other differences among Civil War soldiers, rather than their assumed commonalities.</p>
The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 12, 2021
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