Southern Home Front

Southern home front studies have been one of the most robust areas of research in Civil War and Southern history over the last three decades. The field can be broken into two broad groups – those studies that are primarily concerned with understanding the nature of the war and those that are more focused on people in particular places over time. The former group has generated a broad set of writing that explores questions of dissent, loyalty, guerrilla violence, and divided families. The latter group asks broader questions about the war's impact on particular places and has done much to explain the meaning of the Civil War in American life. Both groups use a broad array of traditional social history sources but have adopted a wide variety of analytical approaches, variously emphasizing labor, gender, race, region, or class.