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Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary by Nancy Disher Baird (review)

86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary, edited by Nancy Disher Baird, a professor and special collections librarian at Western Kentucky University, details the experiences of a Kentuckian in the months leading up to the Civil War and in its first year. Underwood, a young woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky, was an opinionated and outspoken Unionist, and her diary reveals much about southern Unionist ideology, her experiences in a city occupied by two armies, and the social life of a woman in her early twenties. Born in 1840, Josie Underwood had just turned twenty when she began keeping her diary in December 1860. Until September 1862, when her family moved to Scotland so her father could serve as consul at Glasgow, Underwood recorded happenings in and around Bowling Green as the Civil War began and troops, first Confederate and then Union, occupied her city. Although the original two volumes of Underwood’s diary have been lost, Baird makes a compelling case for the authenticity of the typescript on which the volume is based. (The typescript is part of the collections of Western Kentucky University’s Kentucky Library.) Baird is an adept editor. Throughout the work, her annotations elaborate on Underwood’s allusions to historical events and literary works. A particularly helpful addition is an appendix to the diary, which provides biographical this region in larger histories. Because of Kentucky’s Union status and because Tennessee ratified the fourteenth amendment (and so avoided Congressional Reconstruction), these states are often absent from histories of Reconstruction. But as Jonathan Atkins’s essay on Tennessee reveals, the politics of both places played a central role in shaping the national story. B. Franklin Cooling’s essay shows how the experience of Kentucky complicated the process of nation-building after the war. The bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birth has brought renewed attention to Kentucky’s most famous son; Sister States, Enemy States reminds us that the region itself merits closer scrutiny. Aaron Sheehan-Dean University of North Florida