The humanities and social science

2019 Issue №4

Household management as seen by the federal military per­sonnel during the American Civil War

Abstract

The problem of the American Civil War participants’ place in family rela­tions is frequently raised by scholars specializing in the cultural and social history of the conflict. Despite this fact, the dynamics of economic relation­ships between the Federal servicemen on the front and their relatives lacks proper attention. This article aims to define the types of the Union troops’ par­ticipation in the household economy. For this purpose, their letters and diary entries were analyzed in both formal and content-related aspects to find statements concerning the economic well-being of their families. These state­ments were put into the context of a soldier’s or officer’s rank in the family hi­erarchy and their antebellum economic activities. The main results are follow­ing. Firstly, the direct control over the family economics took forms of the real estate purchase and direct instructions concerning family business. It is wor­thy to note that there is a direct correlation between the serviceman’s place in the family and the width of the direct control area. Secondly, many of the farm-owners who joined the army ranks were forced, with some important ex­ceptions, to shift the control over their farms to their wives. Thirdly, the young Union soldiers did not participate in household economy planning. Ra­ther they sent their wages home, gave non-imperative advice and made mo­derate requests.

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Echelon lists as a source for the database of immi­grants to the Kaliningrad region in 1946 (the case of the Pravdinsky district)

Abstract

The authors analysed the lists of immigrants to the Pravdinsky district in 1946, which are stored in the State Archive of the Kaliningrad Region. The ar­ticle describes the main features of compiling echelon lists of immigrants and receiving echelons from Russia and Belarus. The authorsstudied the differ­ences in the design of similar documents and the difficulties that arise when extracting information from them. A wide variety of sources available in the archive makes it possible to obtain diverse and informative material for the da­tabase on the settlement of the region by Soviet people during the first years after the Second World War.

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