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Janet Croon: The War Outside My Window Our September speaker, author Janet Croon, will present the edited diaries of a young teenage boy who wrote thoughtful and wistful observances of the changing world in Macon, Georgia, from 1860-1865, as he battled his own deteriorating health. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family. After a horrific leg injury at age 12 he began keeping a diary in 1860 just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country apart. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family. After a horrific leg injury at age 12 he began keeping a diary in 1860 just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country apart. He wrote even as his health deteriorated past the end of the war. He died in 1865. The diary is published for the first time and editor Janet Croon captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of the South and a crumbling way of life even as his own as his body fails him. Janet E. Croon holds a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science, Modern European History, and Russian Language and Area Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1983), and a Master's Degree in International Studies from the University of Dayton (1985). She taught International Baccalaureate History for nearly two decades and developed a deep interest in the Civil War by living in northern Virginia.
Jan and I discuss her edited volume: The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1861-1865. The diary offers the unique perspective of a young man bedridden during the war. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/the-rogue-historian/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-rogue-historian/support
August 27, 2018 - Our time machine whirls us back to the Civil War sickbed of 12-year-old LeRoy Wiley Gresham. This young voice of the Old South in Macon, Georgia -- rendered an invalid after a mysterious accident, and ignorant of the tuberculosis marching him towards an early grave -- left us the only diary of a male, teenage non-combatant. Savas Beatie LLC, "Publisher of Historical Titles of Distinction," brings us this poignant, insightful and witty diary for the very first time, edited by Janet E. Croon. The book is The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865. Our guest is Theodore P. Savas -- attorney, author, publishing consultant, agent, and the managing director of Savas Beatie. Ted acquired the diaries and did what historians thought impossible: Added a fresh new voice to our understanding of the Civil War. On top of The War Outside My Window, LeRoy's first-person description of spinal tuberculosis is also the only record of its kind in the world. You can deliver into that story in the companion book, I Am Perhaps Dying: The Medical Backstory of Spinal Tuberculosis Hidden in the Civil War Diary of Leroy Wiley Gresham, by Dennis A. Rasbach MD FACS and Janet Croon. You can also visit the Gresham home where LeRoy lived, wrote, and died at The 1842 Inn. Visit SavasBeatie.com for details, follow them on Twitter at SavasBeattieLLC, and find Janet Croon's reflections at TheWarOutsideMyWindow.blogspot.com or Facebook.com/LeRoyWileyGresham. Check out our interviews with these other fine Savas Beatie authors: · Gene Barr -- A Civil War Captain and His Lady: Love, Courtship, and Combat from Fort Donelson through the Vicksburg Campaign. · Noah Andre Trudeau -- Lincoln’s Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days that Changed a Presidency, March 24 – April 8, 1865. · Stephen Davis -- A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw to the Chattahoochee, May 5-July 18, 1864, and its companion paperback, All the Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign from Peach Tree Creek to the City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864.
Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. Snark lurks quietly in his words. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg. Janet Elizabeth Croon—recently retired from teaching International Baccalaureate History in Fairfax County, Virginia—has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary, and provides detailed information about the people around LeRoy, as well as the results of battles and the realities of his ailments at which he could only guess. Listen to my conversation with Janet as we talk about how the not so trivial details of food and weather and playing chess become momentous in his felt understanding of the world. Although he could see his body deteriorate, the point of LeRoy’s own written record is that the experience of pain is never completely localizable. The more his body was down, the more his ears were perked, receptive to the latest vagaries of the time. One of the ongoing themes in our conversation is that LeRoy’s physical separation from the fight opened a wider space to consider it, inciting much laughter at his own predicament (and the country’s), and a deep absorption of the trials and joys around him. Eventually his thoughts on the talents and blunders of the war’s commanders and his thoughts on his daily pain become one. He comes to an end, and the world has changed. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. Snark lurks quietly in his words. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg. Janet Elizabeth Croon—recently retired from teaching International Baccalaureate History in Fairfax County, Virginia—has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary, and provides detailed information about the people around LeRoy, as well as the results of battles and the realities of his ailments at which he could only guess. Listen to my conversation with Janet as we talk about how the not so trivial details of food and weather and playing chess become momentous in his felt understanding of the world. Although he could see his body deteriorate, the point of LeRoy’s own written record is that the experience of pain is never completely localizable. The more his body was down, the more his ears were perked, receptive to the latest vagaries of the time. One of the ongoing themes in our conversation is that LeRoy’s physical separation from the fight opened a wider space to consider it, inciting much laughter at his own predicament (and the country’s), and a deep absorption of the trials and joys around him. Eventually his thoughts on the talents and blunders of the war’s commanders and his thoughts on his daily pain become one. He comes to an end, and the world has changed. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. Snark lurks quietly in his words. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg. Janet Elizabeth Croon—recently retired from teaching International Baccalaureate History in Fairfax County, Virginia—has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary, and provides detailed information about the people around LeRoy, as well as the results of battles and the realities of his ailments at which he could only guess. Listen to my conversation with Janet as we talk about how the not so trivial details of food and weather and playing chess become momentous in his felt understanding of the world. Although he could see his body deteriorate, the point of LeRoy’s own written record is that the experience of pain is never completely localizable. The more his body was down, the more his ears were perked, receptive to the latest vagaries of the time. One of the ongoing themes in our conversation is that LeRoy’s physical separation from the fight opened a wider space to consider it, inciting much laughter at his own predicament (and the country’s), and a deep absorption of the trials and joys around him. Eventually his thoughts on the talents and blunders of the war’s commanders and his thoughts on his daily pain become one. He comes to an end, and the world has changed. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. Snark lurks quietly in his words. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg. Janet Elizabeth Croon—recently retired from teaching International Baccalaureate History in Fairfax County, Virginia—has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary, and provides detailed information about the people around LeRoy, as well as the results of battles and the realities of his ailments at which he could only guess. Listen to my conversation with Janet as we talk about how the not so trivial details of food and weather and playing chess become momentous in his felt understanding of the world. Although he could see his body deteriorate, the point of LeRoy’s own written record is that the experience of pain is never completely localizable. The more his body was down, the more his ears were perked, receptive to the latest vagaries of the time. One of the ongoing themes in our conversation is that LeRoy’s physical separation from the fight opened a wider space to consider it, inciting much laughter at his own predicament (and the country’s), and a deep absorption of the trials and joys around him. Eventually his thoughts on the talents and blunders of the war’s commanders and his thoughts on his daily pain become one. He comes to an end, and the world has changed. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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