Clara Barton, Act II: Finding the Missing

[WARNING: For the next few weeks, it’s going to be all Civil War all the time here at the Margins as we lead up to February 16, when Little Brown releases Heroines of Mercy Street into the world. I’ll try to keep the My Book! My Book! to a minimum and focus on the stories…

Read More

“Our Army Nurses”

About a million years ago, I wrote a study guide to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage for a reference book called The Literature of War. In the course of my research, I was introduced to the flood of material produced about the American Civil War some twenty or thirty years after it ended:…

Read More

Mercy Street (aka A Moment of Blatant Self-Promotion)

Just so you know, this is what I spent the last ten weeks doing: It’s the companion volume to a new PBS historical drama about nurses in the Civil War. The PBS series uses a real Civil War hospital as the setting for a fictionalized (and quite gorgeous) drama. (Check out some of promotional pieces…

Read More