Great Civil War Projects You Can Build Yourself
by Maxine Anderson
The Civil War is still alive and well here in the Deep South, however you may feel about that. No matter how you feel about keeping alive the memories of that awful, bloody war between American brethren, there is no doubt that it is a huge benchmark in American History, and a study of the time and places of the Civil War is a fascinating study. Great Civil War Projects You Can Build Yourself is a great hands-on resource for those who want to not only read their history, but recreate and live it as well.
The book begins with a fairly short introduction that explains the basis of the war and a brief overview of the years and how everything finally ended. This really is nothing more than the smallest of introductions to the topic, and is written on a level for about 4th to 5th grade. After the introduction you are taken to the meat of the book, a series of 18 chapters with good information about specific parts of the war and how people lived during that time.
To begin, there are 11 chapters about soldier life; what they ate, wore, slept in, how the sick were treated, transportation, communication and more. Each chapter has about 4 or 5 pages of information about the topic at hand, including sidebars with more information, definitions and trivia. The end of each chapter contains instructions for hands-on crafts and projects that are both easy and fun. Most of the projects use household items, with the occasional addition of something you might have to buy especially for your creation. You can make army musical instruments, a pinhole camera, battleships, uniforms, food and more. All of the instructions and pictures are clear and easy to understand, even though they are simple illustrations.
After the chapters on soldier and battlefield life, the book then covers life back at home for the citizens not fighting in the war. Fashion, food, music and more are covered in this section. Again, there are projects for every topic, such as making a ladies fan, homemade ink and paper, cornhusk dolls and lanterns for the Underground railroad.
At the end of the book there is a section of templates for some of the projects, such as flag emblems, circles of specific sizes for hats, quilt squares and so on. Following the templates is a good glossary of various terms found in the book, and last an index so you can find things again quite easily.
Great Civil War Projects is a great book for someone looking for good project ideas that will really help your history studies come alive right in your home. The projects are not cumbersome or difficult, and I think you'll find your kids begging for "just one more!" easily. It is absolutely chock full of interesting information, some of which I'd never heard before myself. If you like history projects, you'll definitely want this one on your shelf.
