After a trip to Charleston, South Carolina in the spring of my eighth grade year, I wrote about what I had learned about the Civil War both from our trip and reading non-fiction and fiction texts about the tumultuous time. One text was a storybook titled “The Silent Witness: A True Story of the Civil War” (written by Robin Friedman and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola), which is the amazing story of a rag doll, who ended up being a surprising witness to the end of the war. Here’s an excerpt from my writing: The end of the war came in a small town in Virginia called Appomattox Courthouse, in…