A UNION TOWN DURING THE CIVIL WAR
WOBURN, MASSACHUSETTS

About the Author

Leon Edmund Basile was born in Woburn, Massachusetts on December 12, 1955, and inherited a strong interest in American history from his parents. At age eighteen, his first article was published, and in the next decade, he contributed articles to such scholarly journals and magazines as Civil War History, Lincoln Herald, The Journal of Mississippi History, North South Trader and The Antiques Journal. He also edited The Civil War Diary of Amos E. Stearns, a Prisoner at Andersonville (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981). He has concentrated in the social history of the antebellum and Civil War periods. His current book, A Union Town During the Civil War: Woburn, Massachusetts, is Volume One of a planned trilogy.

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Educated in Woburn public schools, he then earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and English (double major) at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a Master of Arts degree in history (American) at the University of Georgia (Athens). He also studied archives administration under the Division of Librarianship, Emory University, in Atlanta. He attended Officers Candidate School (Quantico, Virginia), United States Marine Corps, but did not complete it, and was honorably discharged in 1980. In his youth, he visited most of the major historical sites of the Civil War. He has a special interest in early photography and is a collateral descendant of a Confederate soldier from Mississippi. Mr. Basile is a lifelong resident of Woburn. He suffered a crippling stroke three days after his forty-eighth birthday, causing a permanent cognitive disability and aphasia. He had virtually completed the research of the trilogy before his stroke, but wrote most of Volume One after his stroke, with the help of his former editor and friend, the late John D. McElhiney, Esq. Due to his disability, Mr. Basile and William Sweeney will attempt to co-write Volume Two.