"We all live, I have come to believe, within the stories we tell," writes Drew Faust, "for these tales fashion a coherent direction and identity out of the discontinuities of our past, present, and future."Forging an identity was an extraordinary task for white southerners of the late antebellum and Civil War era. In the critically acclaimed "Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War," Faust investigates the experiences of wealthy planters, common soldiers, intellectuals, and Confederate women. She breaks especially fresh ground in her attention to southern thought and belief, to southern society and culture during the Civil War, and to the role of gender relations within the Confederate South.".