This unique pair of diaries offers an unforgettable account of the life of an average Northern family coping with the dangers and tensions of the Civil War. There were thousands like them, but few left such a clear and indelible record of their experiences.

Rachel Cormany (nee Bowman) met Samuel Cormany at Otterbein University in Ohio. After her husband enlisted in a cavalry unit, she writes poignantly of her anxieties, poverty, and loneliness. Samuel, on the other hand, is ambitious in his military career, and tells enthusiastically about his engagements that include camp life, cavalry raids, army politics, and his battles with alcohol. Editor James C. Mohr has arranged the diaries so that the voices of husband and wife alternate, and his notes enlighten many of the issues relating to the diarists and their daily lives.

Fleeing the Nazis in the months before World War II, the Korman family scattered from a Polish refugee camp with the hope of reuniting in America. The father sailed to Cuba on the ill-fated St. Louis; the mother left for the United States after sending her two sons on a Kindertransport. One of the sons was Gerd Korman, whose memoir follows his own path—from the family’s deportation from Hamburg, through his time with an Anglican family in rural England, to the family’s reunited life in New York City. His memoir plumbs the depths of twentieth-century history to rescue the remarkable life story of one of its survivors.