The works listed will allow your students to further explore the theme of Conflict of Individual Loyalties with Loyalties to Community and other themes related to Across Five Aprils:


Fiction
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Viking, 1984. The timeless story of a boy who joins the Union army and finds out in his first battle--the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863--that courage is made of different stuff than he had imagined. (challenge)

Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Walker details the joys and hardships of Vyry Brown and her African-American family in Georgia during and after the Civil War. They find that freedom does not come because government decrees it, nor do human attitudes and behaviors change because of new laws. (challenge)

Rhodes, James A. Johnny Shiloh: A Novel of the Civil War. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959. The story of Johnny Clem, an actual drummer boy who joined the Union army at twelve and became a non-commisioned officer by the time he was fourteen. (average)


Nonfiction
Cox, Clinton. Undying Glory: The Story of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment. New York: Scholastic Hardcover, 1991. Clinton Cox tells the story, recently filmed by Hollywood, of the first African-American regiment to fight in the Civil War. (average)

Meltzer, Milton, ed. Voices from the Civil War: A Documentary History of the Great American Conflict. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Milton Meltzer collected letters, diaries, ballads, newpaper interviews, speeches, and memoirs from those who participated in the Civil War. Among those excerpted are Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Henry David Throreau, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman. (average)

Kantor, MacKinlay. Gettysburg. New York: Random House, 1987. The renowned Civil War historian describes both the battle and its impact on the people in that part of Pennsylvania.