Wars are fought on the home front as well as the battlefront. Spouses, family, friends, and communities are called upon to sacrifice and persevere in the face of a changed reality. Hoosiers on the Home Front explores the lives and experiences of ordinary Hoosiers from around Indiana who were left to fight at home during wartimes. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Indiana Magazine of History, a journal of state and midwestern history published since 1905, this collection includes original diaries, letters and memoirs, and research essays—all focused on Hoosiers on the home front of the Civil War through the Vietnam War. Readers will meet, among others, Joshua Jones of the 19th Indiana Volunteer Regiment and his wife, Celia; Attia Porter, a young resident of Corydon, Indiana, writing to her cousin about Morgan's Raid; Civil War and World War I veterans who came into conflict over the Indianapolis 500 and Memorial Day observances; Virginia Mayberry, a wife and mother on the World War II home front; and university students and professors—including antiwar activist Howard Zinn and conservative writer R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.—clashing over the Vietnam War. Hoosiers on the Home Front offers a compelling glimpse of how war impacts everyone, even those who never saw the front line.

A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.

Fighting Hoosiers: Indiana in Two World Wars tells the compelling, heartbreaking, and breathtaking stories of some of the hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers who served their country during the First and Second World Wars. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Indiana Magazine of History, a journal of state and midwestern history published since 1905, the collection includes original diaries, letters and memoirs, as well as research essays—all of them focused on Hoosiers in the two world wars. Readers will meet Alex Arch, a Hungarian-born immigrant who was the first American to fire a shot in World War I; Maude Essig, a nurse serving with the American Red Cross in wartime France; Kenneth Baker, a soldier in the Army Signal Corps, who crawled across French fields (sometimes over and around dead bodies) to lay phone lines for military communications; and Bernard Rice, a combat medic who witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Indiana's brave men and women like these have served with distinction in the armed forces since the earliest days of the Indiana Territory. Fighting Hoosiers offers a compelling glimpse at some of their remarkable stories.

Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century Emma Lou Thornbrough Edited and with a final chapter by Lana Ruegamer Sequel to Thornbroug's early groundbreaking study of African Americans. Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century is the long-awaited sequel to Emma Lou Thornbrough's classic study The Negro in Indiana before 1900. In this posthumous volume, Thornbrough (1913-1994), the acknowledged dean of black history in Indiana, chronicles the growth, both in numbers and in power, of African Americans in a northern state that was notable for its antiblack tradition. She shows the effects of the Great Migration of African Americans to Indiana during World War I and World War II to work in war industries, linking the growth of the black community to the increased segregation of the 1920s and demonstrating how World War II marked a turning point in the movement in Indiana to expand the civil rights of African Americans. Indiana Blacks describes the impact of the national civil rights movement on Indiana, as young activists, both black and white, challenged segregation and racial injustice in many aspects of daily life, often in new organizations and with new leaders. The final chapter by Lana Ruegamer explores ways that black identity was affected by new access to education, work, and housing after 1970, demonstrating gains and losses from integration. Emma Lou Thornbrough (1913-1994), the acknowledged expert on Indiana black history, was author of The Negro in Indiana before 1900: A Study of a Minority (1957, reprinted 1993) and Since Emancipation: A Short History of Indiana Negroes, 1863-1963 (1964) and editor of This Far by Faith: Black Hoosier Heritage (1982). Professor of History at Butler University from 1946 to 1983, Thornbrough held the McGregor Chair in History and received the university's highest award, the Butler Medal. Born in Indianapolis, she was educated at Shortridge High School, Butler University, and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1946). Lana Ruegamer, editor for the Indiana Historical Society from 1975 to 1984, is author of A History of the Indiana Historical Society, 1830-1980. She taught at Indiana University from 1986 to 1998 and is presently associate editor of the Indiana Magazine of History. Ruegamer won the 1995 Thornbrough prize for best article published in that magazine. Contents Editor's Introduction The Age of Accommodation The Great Migration and the First World War The 1920s: Increased Segregation Depression and New Deal The Second World War Postwar Years: Beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement School Desegregation The Turbulent 1960s Since 1970--Advances and Retreats The Continuing Search for Identity

"This book was written to provide and preserve an oral history of the eighty-four men and women who were interviewed...sharing their memories of World War II. The stories include seventy-six veterans and eight women who served as USO volunteers, Red Cross service workers, a Holocaust survivor, and women who worked on the home front...All of the veterans and the women who served in various support roles have a connection to Indiana"--from the Preface.

Beyond his playing days and into adulthood as a budding writer."--Jacket.

For all that has been written about the Civil War's impact on the urban northeast and southern home fronts, we have until now lacked a detailed picture of how it affected specific communities in the Union's Midwestern heartland. Nicole Etcheson offers a deeply researched microhistory of one such community--Putnam County, Indiana, from the Compromise of 1850 to the end of Reconstruction-and shows how its citizens responded to and were affected by the war. Delving into the everyday life of a small town in one of the nineteenth century's bellwether states, A Generation at War considers the Civil War within a much broader chronological context than other accounts. It ranges across three decades to show how the issues of the day-particularly race and sectionalism-temporarily displaced economic and temperance concerns, how the racial attitudes of northern whites changed, and how a generation of young men and women coped with the transformative experience of war. Etcheson interrelates an impressively wide range of topics. Through temperance and alcohol she illustrates nativism and class consciousness, while through an account of a murder she probes ethnicity, politics, and gender. She reveals how some women wanted to "maintain dependence" and how the war gave independence to others, as pensions allowed them to survive without a male provider. And she chronicles the major shift in race relations as the most revolutionary change: blacks had been excluded from Indiana in the 1850s but were invited into Putnam County by 1880. Etcheson personalizes all of these issues through human stories, bringing to life people previously ignored by history, whether veterans demanding recognition of their sacrifice, women speaking out against liquor, or Copperheads parading against Republicans. The introduction of race with the North Carolina Exodusters marks a particularly effective lens for seeing how the idealism unleashed by Lincoln's war influenced the North. Etcheson also helps us understand how white Southerners tried to reunify the country on the basis of shared white racism. Drawing on personal papers, local newspapers, pension petitions, Exoduster pamphlets, and more, Etcheson demonstrates how microhistory helps give new meaning to larger events. A Generation at War opens a new window on the impact of the Civil War on the agrarian North.