read The excerpts from women’s writing captured in Marilyn Mayer Culpepper’s Trials and Triumphs: The Women of the American Civil War;
write an essay that is 1250 words that show what ways your source tell us more about some of the themes and issues we have been considering in class discussion?
If you’re looking for some direction, you may consider one or some of the prompts below:r
How does the experience of the Civil War change or transform the people it swept up in the history it made? Did the war – and the various, sometimes dramatic social changes that it brought – create new possibilities of identity?
What particular aspects of American identity do the writer(s) work with, or contend against, or navigate in the process of defining him/her/their self/selves? What social constructions of race or gender or other aspects of identity do they draw from? In what ways does the experience of the war transform those aspects of identity?
make sure to use quotes and cite them using the chicago style