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Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front. By James Marten. American Childhoods. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Pp. [xii], 209. $26.00, ISBN 1-56663-563-2.)
In Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front, James Marten elaborates the arguments he first put forth in The Children's Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1998) and that are illustrated in his Lessons of War: The Civil War in Children's Magazines (Wilmington, Del., 1999). Chief among those arguments are that children not only are influenced by the cultural milieu but are important participants in shaping culture. At the time of the Civil War, children made up one-third of the nation's population. They were everywhere-at political rallies and public entertainments, in churches and family gatherings, in schools with new literary texts, and certainly in the army. Marten makes excellent use of primary materials to capture the voices...