War Upon Our Border: Two Ohio Valley Communities Navigate the Civil War By Stephen I. Rockenbach AND A Generation At War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community By Nicole Etcheson

Abstract

“Our best chance of understanding the Civil War era is through the eyes of the ordinary people who lived it,” writes Stephen Rockenbach. Instead of focusing on “representative events” like political elections and battles, historians must view these moments as “a small part of an overall collective experience shared among a diverse group of people” (Rockenbach, p. 192). One way to weave together individual ordinary lives into a “collective experience” is through what Nicole Etcheson describes as “microhistory,” a localized study of diverse peoples in a particular geographic setting (Etcheson, p. 17).