{"id":18630,"date":"2014-08-19T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T15:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=18630"},"modified":"2014-08-18T23:57:12","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T04:57:12","slug":"apsu-professors-publish-civil-war-diary-about-life-in-clarksville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2014\/08\/19\/apsu-professors-publish-civil-war-diary-about-life-in-clarksville\/","title":{"rendered":"APSU professors publish Civil War diary about life in Clarksville"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AustinClarksville, TN<\/strong> – On a cold night in February 1862, the moans and whimpers of injured Confederate soldiers filled the streets of Clarksville.<\/p>\n

Hospitals had been set up in local buildings to treat the wounded, following the Battle of Fort Donelson in nearby Dover, and whispered rumors claimed the Union army was heading for the city.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Minoa Uffelman holds a copy of the new book \u201cThe Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman\u2019s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863-1890.\u201d (Taylor Slifko, APSU)<\/p><\/div>\n

A 15-year-old girl named Nannie Haskins watched as panic swept through her hometown. Some people fled, but others simply had nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n

Within a few days, Union soldiers were marching through the streets, demanding citizens present identification papers. A year after the fall of Clarksville, Nannie opened her diary and jotted down a few notes on what she\u2019d seen.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe very first entry in her diary is about Fort Donelson and the panic,\u201d Dr. Minoa Uffelman, Austin Peay State University associate professor of history, said. \u201cThe best description of the fall of Clarksville comes from her.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the last several years, Uffelman and three other women \u2013 APSU communication professor Ellen Kanervo, Montgomery County Historian Eleanor Williams and Phyllis Smith, former president of the Friends of Fort Defiance \u2013 have worked to transcribe Haskins\u2019 journals.<\/p>\n

Their hard work was finally rewarded this July when the University of Tennessee Press published their book, \u201cThe Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman\u2019s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863-1890,\u201d as part of its \u201cVoices of the Civil War\u201d series.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve probably worked on it, off and on, for about seven years,\u201d Kanervo said. \u201cI think I know 1860s Clarksville better than I know 2014 Clarksville.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book is available at APSU\u2019s Ann Ross Bookstore, the Fort Defiance Interpretive Center, The Customs House Museum and online at amazon.com. At 5:00pm on September 9th, the University will host a book signing with the authors at the Pace Alumni Center at Emerald Hill.<\/p>\n

Readers of the diary will find a text rich with local history, providing them with a glimpse of an occupied city during the Civil War.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat surprised me was the rich social life she had,\u201d Kanervo said. \u201cShe talked about people stopping by. They would have parties; people would bring a violin or play a piano. There were parties where there were dances. A lot of social activity was going on even as there was grief and mourning and fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the war ended, Nannie married an older widower with four children and went on to have six children with him. The Reconstruction Era began, the economy suffered, and through it all, she continued writing in her diary.<\/p>\n

[320left]\u201cWhat makes the diary unique is it takes us from her being a teenager during the crisis of the Civil War to her being married, raising children, living in a terrible economy in the post-war south,\u201d Uffelman said. \u201cShe writes about mortgages and droughts and trying to educate her children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nannie\u2019s name became prominent among historians and Civil War enthusiasts in the early 1990s when excerpts of her diary were used in Ken Burns\u2019 award-winning PBS documentary \u201cThe Civil War.\u201d Her daughter donated the Civil War portion of the diary to the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville in 1961. The postwar diary disappeared until the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill purchased it from an antique dealer.<\/p>\n

The four local researchers combed through these and other documents, with Smith transcribing the entries while the others worked on providing the historical context for the book.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have an introduction, and we have an appendix describing all the Civil War sites, the officers,\u201d Uffelman said. \u201cIt is extensively footnoted.\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve spent years reading about Nannie\u2019s transformation from a girl to grandmother. And because of the personal nature of a diary, the researchers found themselves developing a connection with their subject.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe feel like we know her,\u201d Uffelman said. \u201cI liked her. I liked that she was inquisitive and smart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several more book signings and talks are scheduled throughout the year.<\/p>\n

For more information on those events, contact Uffelman at uffelmanm@apsu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – On a cold night in February 1862, the moans and whimpers of injured Confederate soldiers filled the streets of Clarksville. Hospitals had been set up in local buildings to treat the wounded, following the Battle of Fort Donelson in nearby Dover, and whispered rumors claimed the Union army was heading for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[23,9749,262,23676,4124,1485,512,825,23675,3211,1904,3338,17078,1483,6235,4472,7886,2475,4950,7158,6236,3292,8437,23677,23678,20938],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-4Qu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18631,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18630\/revisions\/18631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}