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About the Topic:
Gary Gallagher reports:
The War Outside My Window; The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 is a remarkable diary that illuminates important aspects of mid-19th-century American life. Kept by a Georgia teenager coping with a fatal disease, it affords modern readers the best record I have encountered of the daily suffering and treatment of a terminally ill person during the Civil War era. Beyond the rich evidence relating to LeRoy Wiley Gresham’s illness and Victorian medicine, it includes a bountiful array of observations about military, political, and social elements of the Civil War as witnessed from the Confederate home front. Alternately instructive, moving, and disturbing, this diary deserves a wide audience.
Janet Croon spoke about her book and her effort to annotate the diary of an articulate Southern teenager, Leroy Wiley Gresham, who records his observations on military, political, and social events of the War in Macon, Georgia. Her work also offers readers insight into a parallel internal battle being waged by the young man.
A short interview with Ms. Croon about the book is posted at https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/G18YPrPDFNS.mp4
About the Speaker:
Janet Elizabeth Croon recently retired from teaching advanced high school history in Fairfax County, Virginia. Originally from the Chicago area, she has lived in several places, including Dayton, OH, Albuquerque, NM, and Wiesbaden, Germany before eventually ending up in the Northern Virginia suburbs.
Ms. Croon holds degrees from the University of Illinois (BA '83) in Political Science, Modern European History, and Russian Language and Area Studies and the University of Dayton (MA '85) in International Relations. She began teaching World History and Twentieth Century Topics in the International Baccalaureate Programme, for which she also did some contract work as a program moderator and student paper examiner.
Her love for Civil War history came about almost by accident: She found out she was working with a lawyer in the former home of a Confederate female spy, and then she then read a book about that same spy's friend a number of years later.
With two grown daughters successfully launched, Ms. Croon spends a lot of her spare time knitting, cross-stitching, watching Cubs baseball, and enjoying the history of the area once occupied by either Blue or Grey for the entirety of the Civil War. Her black cat, Kittn, supervises.
