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Across Five Aprils
Jethro Creighton is the story's protagonist. Across Five Aprils is his coming-of-age story, detailing his difficult transition to manhood during a crucial period in American history. As with most...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro has an excellent relationship with his mother Ellen. In fact, she's more like a big sister than a mom. It's a testament to the closeness of their relationship that Jethro and Ellen often...
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Across Five Aprils
Wilse brings "news of the Kentucky country where (Jethro's mother) had been born, and of the relatives from whom she so seldom heard". He also brings news of the feelings of the Kentuckians...
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Across Five Aprils
Because Hunt tries to write fairly about the Civil War in this novel, there are a great many internal conflicts. One which really struck me was the internal conflict for Bill. Jethro's brother...
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Across Five Aprils
The book does not include a family tree as such; that is something you will have to put together yourself. I am assuming that your assignment is to make a family tree for the Creighton family, and...
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Across Five Aprils
Dave Burdow helps Jethro's family a second time when they are rebuilding their barn. Although he is not comfortable enough to come to help with the building himself, he sends a wagonload of cut...
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Across Five Aprils
John tells about finally meeting up with his brother Bill in a letter written soon after a battle in Nashville, Tennessee, in December of 1864. John, who is fighting for the North, is put in...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro decides to write a letter to Lincoln because he doesn't know what else to do - there are no clear answers to the moral dilemma that he faces. Eb Carron has deserted from the Army and is in...
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Across Five Aprils
The people of the north are beginning to doubt the leadership. McClellan had been well respected, but now people are questioning whether he can assure a victory. The army had victories at both...
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Across Five Aprils
After three days of fierce combat and casualties on both sides numbering in the tens of thousands, the Union Army defeated the Confederates in what has often been thought of as the turning point in...
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Across Five Aprils
Chapter 5 opens, Ellen lay in her bed, limp with the agony of a headache. It always happened when the supply of coffee ran out. When coffee prices soar to seventy cents a pound, with predictions...
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Across Five Aprils
Matt Creighton means that the reach of the war's destruction is great - the war affects everyone, even those not directly involved in the fighting. Of the four Creighton boys old enough to join...
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Across Five Aprils
When Ross Milton warns Jeth, "Don't expect peace to be a perfect pearl", he is telling the youth not to expect that, with the ceasing of hostilities, the idyllic world he remembers will be...
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Across Five Aprils
When Jethro meets Bill on Walnut Hill, Bill tells him that he is leaving to fight for the Confederacy. Bill has just had a terrible fight with John, the brother with whom he has always been the...
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Across Five Aprils
In the heated conversation amongst the men in Chapter 2, Wilse Graham is the most passionately devoted to the Confederate cause. He says the root cause of the conflict is that "half of the country...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro equates the Battle of Antietam with the former Battle of Shiloh because both seem to him to have been empty victories. In 1861, before the actual battlefield confrontations of the American...
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Across Five Aprils
This is a novel about the Civil War. The generals and the battles, then, are ones you would expect to read about in a novel about this sad period in U.S. history. The main character, Jethro, is...
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Across Five Aprils
Eb returned to his old regiment, which was stationed in Mississippi; he determined to work hard and do a good job for them until his term of enlistment was fulfilled. Eb had been in a deep...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro says that "the saddest and most cruel April" of the five years of the Civil War was the last, in 1865. In that April, the end of the war had finally been announced with the terms of peace...
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Across Five Aprils
First, their barn is burnt down by locals who are angry with the family because Bill has gone to fight for the South. The other is that Tom dies in battle. Jeth starts to question the nature of...
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Across Five Aprils
At Gettysburg, there is a fierce and bloody battle, lasting over the course of three days, between Confederate troops led by Robert E. Lee and Union soldiers under Ulysses S. Grant. The North...
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Across Five Aprils
Caught between the competing visions of the war that is tearing apart his country, Jethro Creighton struggles to reconcile the disparate perspectives to which he has been privy just within his own...
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Across Five Aprils
Although all wars are tragic, the especially difficult part of civil wars is that so often brother ends up fighting against brother. Living in the border state of Illinois during the American...
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Across Five Aprils
Tom's letter lets the family know that he and Eb are both still alive and well. They were both at Fort Henry, where the Navy handled most of the fighting, and at Fort Donelson, where casualties...
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Across Five Aprils
In chapter 9 of Irene Hunt's "Across Five Aprils," President Lincoln wrote to Jethro Creighton in response to a letter that Jethro had written to him concerning the men who had deserted their...
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Across Five Aprils
Sam Gardiner is the owner of the general store in town. He is kind to Jethro when the young boy comes in alone, having been sent to get supplies for his family. There are a number of other men...
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Across Five Aprils
According to the narrator, the Battles of Fredricksburg and Stones River have a discouraging effect on the Union soldiers and their supporters. The former was a bitter defeat for the Union, while...
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Across Five Aprils
As the war approaches its fifth April, Jethro is thirteen years old. He has grown tall, and although he is still "slender", his muscles have a tautness achieved through hard physical labor. His...
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Across Five Aprils
The victory at Fort Henry, followed quickly by a second at Fort Donelson, were the first for the Union in the war. After suffering defeat in the opening battles at Bull Run, Ball's Bluff, and...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro is Ellen's youngest, and I think that in detaining him so long before sending him off to Shad's, she is trying to hold onto him, reluctant to let him go off by himself the mile through the...
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Across Five Aprils
One of the biggest changes that Jethro goes through is the change in his attitude towards the war and towards issues in general outside of the farm. From his beginning as the innocent boy who has...
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Across Five Aprils
The soldiers' feeling towards Burnside is captured clearly in the understated ending of Shadrach's letter in Chapter 8. Shadrach says, "I should not like to live with Ambrose Burnside's thoughts...
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Across Five Aprils
During the Civil War, there were a lot of people in the North who did not approve of the war. Many of them believed that the Southern states should be free to have slavery if they wanted. Many of...
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Across Five Aprils
The gift is a large quantity of logs. If you head to Chapter 8 and read about ten paragraphs in, you'll see where Jethro is pleasantly surprised, and somewhat embarrassed, to be the recipient of a...
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Across Five Aprils
Of all his brothers, Jethro has never been close to John. He does not dislike his older brother, but he has not enjoyed the rapport with him that he shares with Bill either. The same reserve...
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Across Five Aprils
Before Shadrach Yale, the other schoolmasters took turns living with different families throughout the district. When Shad, the new schoolmaster, petitioned for space and privacy, he was granted...
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Across Five Aprils
"Copperhead" was a term given to people in the north who sympathized with the south during the Civil War. They were also called Peace Democrats; they were openly critical of Lincoln and...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro was in trouble for helping Eb in Chapter 9 because Eb was a deserter from the Union Army, and according to the law, anyone hiding or otherwise helping deserters were in direct defiance of...
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Across Five Aprils
Early in Across Five Aprils, Irene Hunt's novel of a family struggling to survive the divisions within families as well as across the nation during the American Civil War, there are hints of a...
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Across Five Aprils
The various Creightons have different feelings about the war. Jethro, the youngest, initially shares the excitement of his older brother Tom and cousin Eb, who are under the delusion that war is a...
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Across Five Aprils
Matt Creighton first grants his daughter Jenny permission to travel to Washington to be by the side of her beau, Shadrach Yale, who has been critically wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg. He...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro helps Eb in Chapter 9 because, when all is said and done, he would not be able to live with himself if he does not help someone who is so in need. In his young life, Jethro "had never been...
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Across Five Aprils
Shadrach Yale is critically injured at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Battle of Gettysburg occurred during "three hot July days" in 1863. It was "a battle of unbelievable bravery and unbelievable...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro is working out in the fields when he hears about Lincoln's assassination. He is still basking in the glow of the news of the long-awaited cease-fire, and when he thinks back on the moment,...
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Across Five Aprils
In the beginning of the book, frustrated with the caution and restraint exercised by both men, Jethro compares his father to Abe Lincoln. Jethro's sister Mary has recently died as a result of the...
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Across Five Aprils
According to most sources, Irene Hunt (1907-2001), the author of Across Five Aprils, died on her 94th birthday in 2001. However, I have found several conflicting dates and locations. Most dates...
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Across Five Aprils
Trouble has been brewing between the North and South for many, many years, and when this novel begins, the adults are worrying about the possibility of war between the North and South. Abraham...
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Across Five Aprils
In the fall of 1862, many men in the community have come together on the Creighton property to help re-build the barn which was burned. Not long after the raising of the barn the Creightons...
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Across Five Aprils
Three of John's letters are actually recounted in Chapter 11. In the first, which arrives sometime during the fall or early winter of 1863, John tells about the infamous Battle of Chickamauga and...
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Across Five Aprils
The Battle of Chickamauga took place in the mountains of Tennessee in September of 1863. In a significant Union defeat, the Northern Army of the Cumberland, led by Major General Rosecrans, faced...