Of age : boy soldiers and military power in the Civil War era /
Enormous numbers of boys and youths served in the American Civil War. The first book to arrive at a careful estimate, Of Age argues that underage enlistees comprised roughly ten percent of the Union army and likely a similar proportion of Confederate forces. Their importance extended beyond sheer nu...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2023].
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Table of Contents:
- Part I: Parental rights and the duty to bear arms: Congress, courts, and the military
- Competing obligations: debating underage enlistment in the War of 1812
- A great inconvenience: prewar legal disputes over underage enlistees
- Underdeveloped bodies: calculating the ideal enlistment age
- Part II: The social and cultural origins of underage enlistment
- Instructive violence: impressionable minds and the cultivation of courage in boys
- Pride of the nation: the iconography of child soldiers and drummer boys
- Paths to enlistment: work, politics, and school
- Part III: Male youth and military service during the Civil War
- Contrary to all law: debating underage service in the United States
- Preserving the seed corn: youth enlistment and demographic anxiety in the Confederacy
- Forced into service: enslaved and unfree youth in the Union and Confederate armies
- Epilogue: a war fought by boys: reimagining boyhood and underage soldiers after the Civil War
- Appendix A: counting underage soldiers
- Appendix B: using the early indicators of later work levels, disease, and death database to determine age of enlistment in the Union Army, by Christopher Roudiez.