A Year in the South: 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People that Live Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History, was written by Stephen V. Ash, an educator, historian, and author. Ash is a Civil War scholar, a background which has allowed him to accurately and proficiently write about the American Civil War in A Year in the South: 1865.
A Year in the South: 1865 is a four-way biography that was published in 2002. Even though the book is biographical, it reads a lot like a novel. The book illustrates the impact of the Civil War on the lives of four different Southerners during the year of the hostilities. Ash wrote the biographies using the diaries and memoirs that the four people kept, to show different perspectives of the impact the Civil War generated on each of the Southerners.
The book is organized into four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and autumn. The reader learns about each person's life for one season before moving on to the next season. In the epilogue, Ash gives a concise biographical gist of what happened after 1865 for each of the four people, so the reader could see the long-lasting impacts of the Civil War on the nature of Southern society.
