Focusing on routines as basic as going to school and cooking and cleaning, Voices of Civil War America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life explores the lives of ordinary Americans during one of the nation's most tumultuous eras. The book emphasizes the ordinary rather than the momentous to help students achieve a true understanding of mid-19th-century American culture and society.

Recognizing that there is no better way to learn history than to allow those who lived it to speak for themselves, the authors utilize primary documents to depict various aspects of daily...

Students studying the American Revolutionary War learn primarily about battles and how independence from the British was achieved. In Voices of Revolutionary America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life, readers get the largely untold story of the American Revolution: the ongoing issues and details of life in the background, behind the battles.

This book surveys the entirety of the Revolutionary era, describing topics like marriage, childbirth, learning a trade, cost of living, slavery, and religion in the late 18th century. While some documents from the 1760s and early...

"Voices of Ancient Greece and Rome: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life" sheds light on various aspects of Greek and Roman daily life by examining excerpts from the works of ancient authors who wrote about these topics. Written to help readers truly understand what life within an ancient civilization was like, each entry is preceded by background information and followed by thought-provoking questions.

This book covers fascinating topics such as domestic life, employment, housing, food and clothing, sports and games, public safety, education, health care, politics, and religion. Each...

World War II was the most destructive and disruptive war ever, a global conflict that in one way or another affected the lives of people across the planet. "Voices of World War II: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life" coalesces a wide variety of primary source documents drawn from across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Supplemented by interpretive material that enables readers to analyze them, assess their impact and significance, and place them in context to comparable situations today, the documents provide rare insights into World War II.

Expert commentaries and additional...

"Voices of Victorian England" illuminates the character, personalities, and events of the era through excerpts from primary documents produced between 1837 and 1901. By allowing Queen Victoria's contemporaries to speak for themselves, this work brings the achievements and conflicts that occurred during the queen's long reign alive for high school and college students as well as the general public.

Excerpts represent literary giants such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and Anthony Trollope. The book covers the worlds of politics, religion, economics, and science, and...

Early Christianity drew its doctrine from a variety of sources--personal interpretation, Hebrew scriptures, and church council--yet the core ideology endured, even as the religion transitioned from being the object of persecution to becoming a legal institution in the Roman Empire. This book celebrates the voices that helped create and develop Christianity during that period.

"Voices of Early Christianity: Documents from the Origins of Christianity" is a collection of excerpts from significant documents from early Christian history, organized topically, then listed chronologically...

A wealth of evidence survives to tell the stories of ancient Egypt, including monuments, artifacts, paintings, sculptures, human remains, and literature. But there is yet another way to access this fascinating culture--through original writings that span the period from circa 3100 BCE to 400 CE. This book's 51 documents include schoolboys' letters and exercises, prayers, hymns, love poems, narratives, historical inscriptions, medical and mathematical texts, and religious and funerary inscriptions. Most of the texts are penned by Egyptians, but another perspective is added through the...

"Voices of the Iraq War: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life" illuminates the complex and poorly reported realities of the conflict that those without direct experience cannot possibly fathom, presenting detailed personal accounts of what the conflict in Iraq was like across multiple disciplines and through a variety of viewpoints. The accounts are based on interviews with American, Iraqi-American, and British officers who deployed and fought throughout the country of Iraq.

The book begins with the story of an Iraqi boy who flees Iraq with his family after Desert Storm and then returns...

Voices of Medieval England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life provides a broad selection of primary documents that are appropriate in level and content for a variety of readers. It includes dozens of primary document excerpts that illustrate important elements of daily life during the medieval period. Each document is accompanied by an introduction that supplies relevant historical background, context points to help readers evaluate the document, a description of the results and consequences of the document, and a "Further Information" section...