Elizabeth Hoxie Joyner is museum curator at Vicksburg National Military Park and the author of The USS Cairo: History and Artifacts of a Civil War Gunboat (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006).

Articles by Elizabeth Hoxie Joyner

left and above: Naval Historical Center

How Civil War Sailors Lived

By Elizabeth Hoxie Joyner
October 2008
When the Union ironclad gunboat Cairo went to the muddy bottom of the Yazoo River in 1862, she carried items made by companies most of us would recognize today.