Suggested Readings

The following texts might prove helpful for readers who wish to better understand the world that the Fikes inhabited and to dive deeper into the issues and questions that their correspondence raised.

Aley, Ginette and Joseph L. Anderson, editors. Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front

during the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013.

Attie, Jeanie. Patriotic Toll: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1988.

Bahde, Thomas. “‘Our Cause Is a Common One’: Home Guards, Union Leagues, and

Republican Citizenship in Illinois, 1861-1863.” Civil War History 56:1 (March 2010): 66-98.

Browning, Judkin and Timothy Silver. An Environmental History of the Civil War. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Cashin, Joan, editor. The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2002.

Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New

York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Clinton, Catherine and Nina Silber, editors. Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American

Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992.

Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War

and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Etcheson, Nicole. A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community.

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011.

Faragher, John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1986.

Frank, Lisa Tendrich, and LeeAnn Whites, editors. Household War: How Americans Lived and

Fought the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020.

Gallagher, Gary. The Union War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Giesberg, Judith. Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Hager, Christopher. I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2018.

Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the

Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Hicken, Victor. Illinois in the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966.

Jimerson, Randall C. The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict.

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War.

New York: Vintage, 2007.

McCurry, Stephanie. Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War.

Cambridge: Belknap, 2019.

McPherson, James. For Cause and Comrade: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997.

Mitchell, Reid. The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1993.

Phillips, Christopher. The Rivers Ran Backwards: The Civil War and the Remaking of the

American Middle Border. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Rose, Anne C. Victorian America and the Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994.

Silber, Nina. Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2005.

Sinisi, Kyle. The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition of 1864. Lanham, Maryland:

Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

Taylor, Amy Murrell. The Divided Family in Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2005.

Taylor, Lenette. “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail: The Civil War of Captain Simon

Perkins, Jr., Union Quartermaster. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004.

Weber, Jennifer. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2006.