Book Signing: "Sam Richards's Civil War Diary: "A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front"

Wendy Venet, a professor of history at Georgia State University, is also the editor of "Sam Richards's Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front."  This previously unpublished diary is the best surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War-era Atlanta.  Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) kept a diary for sixty-seven years and this volume excerpts from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City.