ABSTRACT
The introduction offers a conceptual and theoretical overview of the text. It provides a profile of the common soldiers of the Civil War, an assessment of existing scholarship, and an analysis of the symbolic figure of the soldier in the press. It provides an outline of chapters, and notes for readers that some direct quotations may contain language that reflects racial hatred and other prejudicial attitudes toward immigrants, ethnic groups, Native Americans, women, and individuals with disabilities. As this is a historical study of the nineteenth-century press, that language, when provided in direct quotations, is generally retained in this book in order to accurately reflect the thinking of the time.
