A Changing Wind Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta [Paperback]

WENDY HAMAND VENET is a professor of history at Georgia State University. Her books include Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front (Georgia), A Strong-Minded Woman: The Life of Mary Livermore, and Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War.

In 1845 Atlanta was the last stop at the end of a railroad line, the home of just twelve families and three general stores. By the 1860s, it was a thriving Confederate city, second only to Richmond in importance. A Changing Wind is the first history to explore what it meant to live in Atlanta during its rapid growth, its devastation in the Civil War, and its rise as a New South city during Reconstruction.

A Changing Wind brings to life the stories of Atlanta’s diverse citizens. In a rich account of residents’ changing loyalties to the Union and the Confederacy, the book highlights the unequal economic and social impacts of the war, General Sherman’s siege, and the stunning rebirth of the city in postwar years. The final chapter focuses on Atlanta’s collective memory of the Civil War, showing how racial divisions have led to differing views on the war’s meaning and place in the city’s history.

An engaging exploration of what life was like for residents of Civil War–era AtlantaAn entertaining narrative that evocatively places readers in the midst of Civil War–era Atlanta. This is quite an accomplishment.Overflows with telling details that make the wartime city feel real. . . . Venet gives readers the most fully realized portrait of the fledgling city to date. This is, perhaps, unusually important for a city which, Venet notes, retains no physical vestiges of its Confederate past. But the true measure of her accomplishment is that she has produced a brisk, spirited account that simultaneously ml“®