He employed an innovative approach that foreshadowed what historians today call sensory history. Wiley reoriented the trajectory of the entire field by recovering the daily life of the average Confederate soldier. His The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (1943), the most important and original of all of his works, parted ways with historians who saw military history as a story of strategy and battle tactics. In the 1940s, when most of his peers wrote grand narratives of the war celebrating the heroics of politicians and generals, Wiley published books about Southern women and the experience of African Americans in the Confederacy. Great historians take intellectual risks, and the late Bell Irvin Wiley was fearless when it came to pursuing research topics that other scholars considered taboo. The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy CWT Book Review: The Life of Johnny Reb Close
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