Bøger i Civil War America serien

While slavery is often at the heart of debates over the causes of the Civil War, historians are not agreed on precisely what aspect of slavery--with its various social, economic, political, cultural, and moral ramifications--gave rise to the sectional rift. In Calculating the Value of the Union, James Huston integrates economic, social, and political history to argue that the issue of property rights as it pertained to slavery was at the center of the Civil War.In the early years of the nineteenth century, southern slaveholders sought a national definition of property rights that would recognize and protect their ownership of slaves. Northern interests, on the other hand, opposed any national interpretation of property rights because of the threat slavery posed to the northern free labor market, particularly if allowed to spread to western territories. This impasse sparked a process of political realignment that culminated in the creation of the Republican Party, ultimately leading to the secession crisis.Deeply researched and carefully written, this study rebuts recent trends in antebellum historiography and persuasively argues for a fundamentally economic interpretation of the slavery issue and the coming of the Civil War.

German Americans were one of the largest immigrant groups in the Civil War era, and comprised nearly 10% of Union troops. Yet little attention has been paid to their daily during the war. This collection of letters, written by German immigrants to friends and family back home, provides a new angle to our understanding of the Civil War experience and challenges some long-held assumptions.

Commentators often dismiss Union general George G. Meade when discussing the great leaders of the Civil War. But in this long-anticipated book, Kent Masterson Brown draws on an expansive archive to reappraise Meade's leadership during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Based on research from over 1200 wartime letters and diaries written by more than 400 Confederate officers and enlisted men, this text offers a social history of Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during its final year, from May 1864 to April 1865.

In 1861, as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the Union and prevent war, Abraham Lincoln offered to accept a constitutional amendment that barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the slave states. Daniel Crofts unearths the hidden history and political manoeuvring behind the stillborn attempt to enact this amendment.

This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River.Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.

Offering new and definitive interpretations of the battle of Peach Tree Creek's place within the Atlanta campaign, Earl J. Hess describes how several Confederate regiments and brigades made a pretense of advancing but then stopped partway to the objective and then took cover. Hess shows that morale played an unusually important role in determining the outcome at Peach Tree Creek.

Military historian Earl J. Hess examines how American Civil War commanders adapted their operations to the physical environment, how the environment in turn affected their movements, and how Civil War armies altered the terrain through the science of field fortification. He also illuminates the impact of fighting and living in ditches on the everyday lives of both Union and Confederate soldiers.

Shows that in the process of winning the US Civil War, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class.

In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War-era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights.

Combines military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the American Civil War's significance and impact. As the authors reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape; and sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world.

Examines the Freedmen's Bureau 's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. William Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction.

Known today as "the other speaker at Gettysburg", Edward Everett had a distinguished and illustrative career at every level of American politics from the 1820s through the Civil War. In this new biography, Matthew Mason argues that Everett's extraordinarily well-documented career reveals a complex man whose shifting political opinions illuminate the nuances of Northern Unionism.

Many accounts of the secession crisis overlook the sharp political conflict that took place in the Border South states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Michael D. Robinson expands the scope of this crisis to show how the fate of the Border South, and with it the Union, desperately hung in the balance during the fateful months surrounding the clash at Fort Sumter.

In this insightful book, Stephen Cushman considers Civil War generals' memoirs as both historical and literary works, revealing how they remain vital to understanding the interaction of memory, imagination, and the writing of American history.

In this fascinating work, Jill Ogline Titus uses centennial events in Gettysburg to examine the history of political, social, and community change in 1960s America. She shows how the era's deep divisions thrust Gettysburg into the national spotlight and ensured that white and Black Americans would define its meaning in dramatically different ways.

The Army of the Potomac was a hotbed of political activity during the Civil War. In this comprehensive reassessment of the army's politics, Zachery Fry argues that the war was an intense political education for its common soldiers.

Weaving together biography and political history, Michael Woods restores Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas's fatefully entwined lives and careers to the centre of the Civil War era. Operating on personal, partisan, and national levels, Woods traces the deep roots of Democrats' internal strife.

By 1863 and the final Emancipation Proclamation, the Union army had transformed into the key force for instituting emancipation in the American West. However, Kristopher Teters argues that the guiding principles behind this development in attitudes and policy were a result of military necessity and pragmatic strategies, rather than an effort to enact racial equality.

Renowned military historian Jeffry Wert draws on the personal narratives of Union and Confederate troops to offer a gripping story of Civil War combat at its most difficult. Wert's harrowing tale reminds us that the war's story, often told through its commanders and campaigns, truly belonged to the common soldier.

Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers. They recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications. In Love and Duty, Angela Esco Elder draws on these materials to explore white Confederate widows' stories.

More than 150 years after the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organisations repeat claims that anywhere up to 100,000 African Americans fought in the Confederate army. Kevin Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts and poorly understood primary-source material have helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.

Offers a study of the battle of Bentonville, the only major Civil War battle fought in North Carolina and the Confederacy's last attempt to stop the devastating march of Sherman's army north through the Carolinas. This work analyzes the reasons for the initial success and eventual failure of General Joseph E Johnston's offensive.

The battle of Belmont was the first battle in the western theater of the Civil War and, more important, the first battle of the war fought by Ulysses S Grant. This book provides a study of the battle that catapulted Grant into prominence.