A year in the South

"A Year in the South is about four ordinary people in an extraordinary time. They lived in the South during 1865 - a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation. Against this tumultuous stage, each Southerner fought a private war. Louis Hughes was a slave determined to gain freedom for himself and his family. Widow Cornelia McDonald battled poverty and despair as she struggled to raise seven children by herself. Samuel Agnew, a minister and son of a planter, grappled with spiritual and worldly troubles. John Robertson, a former Confederate soldier, searched for a new life far away from war. Between January and December 1865 they witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Using private journals, diaries, and letters, Stephen V. Ash has written a true social history of the Civil War, reconstructing his characters daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.