Great Civil War Reading

Recently I've been reading Rose Cottage Chronicles: Civil War Letters of the Bryant-Stephens Families of North Florida (University Press of Florida, 1998).It's the best history book on any time period that I've ever read.

This book contains excerpts from 33 diaries and over 800 letters which members of the Bryant-Stephens family kept from the 1850s on.

Many of these papers record the life, love and exploits of Winston and Octavia Stephens, a young, recently married couple separated by the war, and their relatives during the Civil War. These people were educated, articulate, and observant.

But their most outstanding quality is that they are real. Their triumphs and aggravations and worries become real to me as I read.

I felt so caught up in their lives as I was reading these letters and diaries that – although I knew the outcome from other sources, and although I know these people have been dead for a hundred years — I worried about them and I felt strongly tempted to pray about their troubles and for their safety.

The depth of my caring about these people amazed me.

Then as I read further, I began to transpose the concern these pages generated in me to American Soldiers fighting in Iraq and their families who remain in the States. I never expected a history book to give rise to such intense emotion in my own heart.

And with historian Arch Fredric Blakey’s comments and footnotes putting all in context, this is one of the finest history books I have ever read on any geographical area or time period.