{"product_id":"glorious-contentment-the-grand-army-of-the-republic-18651900-civil-war-america-9780807820254","title":"Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic  1865-1900 (Civil War America)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Grand Army of the Republic  the largest of all Union Army veterans organizations  was the most powerful single-issue political lobby of the late nineteenth century  securing massive pensions for veterans and helping to elect five postwar presidents from its own membership. To its members  it was also a secret fraternal order  a source of local charity  a provider of entertainment in small municipalities  and a patriotic organization. Using GAR convention proceedings  newspapers  songs  rule books  and local post records  Stuart McConnell examines this influential veterans association during the years of its greatest strength.  Beginning with a close look at the men who joined the GAR in three localities  Philadelphia; Brockton  Massachusetts; and Chippewa Falls  Wisconsin - McConnell goes on to examine the Union veterans attitudes towards their former Confederate enemies and toward a whole range of noncombatants whom the verterans called civilians: stay-at-home townsfolk  Mugwump penion reformers  freedmen  women  and their own sons and daughters. In the GAR  McConnell sees a group of veterans trying to cope with questions concerning the extent of societys obligation to the poor and injured  the place of war memories in peacetime  and the meaning of the nation and the individuals relation to it.  McConnell aruges that  by the 1890s  the GAR was clinging to a preservationist version of American nationalism that many white  middle-class Northerners found congenial in the face of the social upheavals of that decade. In effect  he concludes  the nineteenth-century career of the GAR is a study in the microcosm of a nation trying to hold fast to an older image of itself in the face of massive social change.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647076720693,"sku":"ByrdShop_0807820253","price":29.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780807820254.jpg?v=1781687880","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/glorious-contentment-the-grand-army-of-the-republic-18651900-civil-war-america-9780807820254","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}