Confederate Hunger: Food and Famine in the Civil War South, 1861-1867

FAIN: FEL-267640-20

Anne S. Rubin
UMBC (Baltimore, MD 21250-0001)

Research leading to a book about the impact of food shortages on food culture in the Civil War South.

Confederate Hunger: Food and Famine in the Civil War South is an exploration of hunger, starvation, and the myriad meanings of food in the Civil War-era South. I use culinary history, particularly as it pertains to Southern food shortages, as a lens into questions of nationalism, resistance, migration, and public welfare. My work is animated by the deceptively simple question: What do people eat when they are starving? And how does that experience shift depending on place, time, and circumstance? This project focuses exclusively on the eleven states of the Confederacy, because of the impact that war and environment had on this agricultural region.