Union and Liberty!

Music heard on the Northern Homefrront during the American Civil War
This recording attempts to present an accurate depiction of American society in the North during the American Civil War through the medium of its popular music. Societies reveal themselves most completely through their popular culture, and a world view radically different from that of modern listeners is expressed in the music heard on this recording - a world view in which some attitudes towards war and peace, courage and honor, life and death, emotions and sentiment, and other peoples and nationalities may strike us as odd, parochial, or even, at times, repugnant. Yet if we are to understand other cultures, including the distant land of our own past, we can do no better than to listen to them speaking in their own words, and refrain from assessing them as if they were part of our own society's current social and value systems.