Due to time constraints, I only use excerpts from The Red Badge of Courage and The American Iliad with my U.S. History classes. Both provide great depth and insight into a soldier’s experience during the American Civil War. I really enjoy incorporating The Red Badge of Courage into my content because such a small fraction of my curriculum incorporates fiction texts. In an ideal concentrated setting, I would love the opportunity to teach both books in full as the students learned about the Civil War.
The Red Badge of Courage, a nineteenth century classic, delves into a young soldier’s longing to be a hero, redeeming himself for deserting his unit in the heat of battle. The main character, Henry, upon leaving his unit, stumbles into a column of wounded soldiers and finds himself deeply envious—wanting to have a “red badge of courage” of his own. He continues wandering until he spots a group of Union soldiers retreating. In the frenzy of their retreat, Henry is hit in the head with a rifle, giving him a bloody gash on his forehead. Once a dazed Henry is led back to his own regiment’s camp, the soldiers in his unit think he was wounded in their battle. To redeem himself for his cowardice, Henry fights the next day with tremendous valor, taking on the most dangerous job a soldier could have—bearing the regimental flag and overcoming the guilt of desertion.
Charles Roland’s The American Iliad, does a masterful job of interweaving military campaigns and personalized accounts of political, social, military, and cultural events of the Civil War. In his book, Roland focuses heavily on the Union & Confederacy’s generals and presidents. While this book is a historical account, Roland’s intended audience is the general reading public—he really makes the history of the events leading to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath very accessible. His book’s battle descriptions are highly readable, and the accompanying maps help readers recreate Civil War combat in their minds.
In Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, the author utilizes clear vocabulary and dialogue between characters that works well in read alouds or directly phrased in the movie version of the book, which would provide ELA students with additional support. Further, the speech is direct, and paragraphs and chapters are relatively short, leaving many opportunities to check for understanding. The story moves quickly and only centers on a single character, limiting the amount of superfluous material and confusion. The reader is meant to identify only with Henry instead of examining both sides of the war at a macro level. But, even though the novel can be read comfortably by students as early as middle school, the book uses a lot of tricky dialect and nineteenth century slang that would be entirely unfamiliar to an ELA student who is trying to master present-day English. Furthermore, the book doesn’t offer any illustrations or images to depict many period-specific items—a musket for example. While the chapters aren’t too long, it is difficult to read the book out of sequence, and the excerpts I select need a lot of pre-teaching to activate background knowledge. By supplementing images of period pieces, explaining 1860s terminology in advance, and incorporating elements of the film, ELA students would receive a more scaffolded approach to this Civil War classic.
While The Red Badge of Courage examines the experience of a single Civil War soldier, Roland’s nonfiction account of the Civil War encompasses a thirty-plus year time span and conveys both the Union and Confederate perspective. Here, students can freely examine specific chapters that center on the most relevant information, and sequence (with the exception of large-scale military campaigns and major political events) is not necessarily critical to understanding. Further, Roland’s book provides numerous images, illustrations, and battle maps to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. Roland’s book is accompanied by a through glossary and index, providing a nice reference for ELA students. But, his text is intended for adults, so a lot of the sophisticated non-historical vocabulary is omitted from the glossary. Furthermore, he tackles the entire Civil War experience—Union and Confederate—in this book, featuring many generals, politicians, pieces of legislation, and locations. This could be tremendously overwhelming—a better approach with this book is to use it in smaller doses, extracting the most relevant information instead of using entire chapters for a class of ELA learners.
Sources
Crane, S. (1895). The red badge of courage. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Pierce, C. (2004). An american iliad: the story of the civil war. Louisville, KY: University
Press of Kentucy.
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