A prestigious fellowship is helping a Mercer University professor to expand upon research exploring the literary and emotional history of Civil War soldiers and their families.
Dr. Sarah Gardner, Distinguished University Professor of History, is the recipient of the 2024-25 Loring Fellowship on the Civil War, Its Origins and Consequences. Awarded to only one scholar each year, the fellowship gives her access to rare historical materials housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Boston Athenaeum, co-sponsors of the fellowship.
Dr. Gardner considers herself a cultural historian, and her research specialties include Civil War-era America, U.S. intellectual and cultural history, and literary history. She is using the Loring Fellowship to advance her research for a book she’s writing about reading habits and practices during the Civil War, particularly in regard to the works of William Shakespeare.
“Broadly speaking, I’m interested in both the homefront as well as the battlefield. That means I’m looking at the soldiers but also the people that soldiers leave behind,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in how people interpret war. What I’ve added to that is I’m interested in literary history. I’m interested in what people are reading.”
The fellowship allows Dr. Gardner to spend at least four weeks at each institution, which will provide her with insights into both sides of the Civil War. She said the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she conducted research in July, specializes in Union war efforts and has many primary, handwritten sources such as letters and diaries. The Boston Athenaeum, which she will visit next June, focuses on the Confederate side and print materials, including newspapers, journal articles, books and poems.
“It was a very successful research trip,” she said of her time at the Massachusetts Historical Society this summer. “The archivists, librarians and staff were wonderful and very supportive and encouraging. It really was a wonderful place to work.”
Dr. Gardner is studying the letters, diaries and commonplace books — in which people recorded information and favorite passages — of soldiers in camp and their wives and children at home to get a sense of the range of emotions they were experiencing during the Civil War.
She is also looking at what they were reading, and that was often Shakespeare. People living during this time were familiar with his plays, either from reading them or seeing them performed, and little libraries that visited military encampments passed around his works. Every Shakespearean play has something to do with war, and people often used the author’s words to describe their experiences or think about warfare, Dr. Gardner said.
“I’m really interested in how people think and how they make sense of the world,” she said. “The history of emotions allows us to enter a world removed from us, either by time or place. Everyone experiences joy or pain, but they experience them differently. We can better understand our historical actors by appealing to the history of emotions.”
