SUBJECT INDEX:

HISTORY:

United States:

Civil War Period (1850-1877)

The American Party Battle: Election Campaign Pamphlets, 1828-1876, Volume 2, 1854-1876
Edited by Joel H. Silbey
The nineteenth century was the heyday of furious contention between American political parties, and Joel Silbey has recaptured the drama and substance of those battles in a representative sampling of party pamphlets. The pamphlets demonstrate how, for this fifty-year period, political parties were surrogates for American demands and values.
Paperback 1999 / Hardcover 1999
Becoming Free in the Cotton South
Susan Eva O'Donovan
This book challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.
Hardcover 2007
Big Enough to Be Inconsistent
George M. Fredrickson
This book focuses on the most controversial aspect of Lincoln’s thought and politics—his attitudes and actions regarding slavery and race. Drawing attention to the limitations of Lincoln’s judgment and policies without denying his magnitude, the book provides the most comprehensive and even-handed account available of Lincoln’s contradictory treatment of black Americans in matters of slavery in the South and basic civil rights in the North.
Hardcover 2008
The Black Hearts of Men
John Stauffer
Drawing on the largest extant bi-racial correspondence in the Civil War era, this book braids together Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and John Brown's struggles to reconcile ideals of justice with the reality of slavery and oppression. As the nation headed toward armed conflict, these men waged their own war by establishing model interracial communities, forming a new political party, and embracing a malleable and "black-hearted" self that was capable of violent revolt against a slaveholding nation.
Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
Bright Radical Star
Robert Dykstra
Hardcover
The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
Mark E. Neely
The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century carnage. In challenging this view, Neely considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limit that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's "total war" and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.
Hardcover 2007
Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies
John F. Marszalek
In the first comprehensive biography of Halleck, Marszalek recreates the life of a man of enormous achievement who bungled his most important mission. When Lincoln summoned him to the nation's capital, Halleck boasted outstanding qualifications as a military theorist, a legal scholar, a brave soldier, and a California entrepreneur. Yet in the thick of battle, he couldn't make essential decisions. Unable to produce victory for the Union forces, he saw his power become subsumed by Grant's emergent leadership, a loss that paved the way for Halleck's path to obscurity.
Hardcover 2004
The Confederate Battle Flag
John M. Coski
Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history. He reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War and shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
Daughters of the Union
Nina Silber
This book casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives.
Hardcover 2005
The Death of Reconstruction
Heather Cox Richardson
Historians overwhelmingly have blamed the demise of Reconstruction on Southerners' persistent racism. Richardson argues instead that class, along with race, was critical to Reconstruction's end. She reveals a growing backlash from Northerners against those who believed that inequalities should be addressed through working-class action, and the emergence of an American middle class that championed individual productivity and saw African-Americans as a threat to their prosperity.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2004
A Diary from Dixie
Mary Boykin Chesnut
Edited by Ben Ames Williams
Foreword by Edmund Wilson
One of the most important documents in southern history, this is a day-by-day diary of the Civil War years. It rings with authenticity while evoking the nostalgia, bitterness, and comedy of the Confederacy.
Hardcover 1980 / Paperback
First Lady of the Confederacy
Joan E. Cashin
When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions.Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
A Fool's Errand
Albion W. Tourgee
Edited by John Hope Franklin
Paperback
The Greatest Nation of the Earth
Heather Cox Richardson
Rejecting the common assumption that domestic legislation during the Civil War was a series of piecemeal reactions to wartime necessities, Heather Cox Richardson argues that Republican party members systematically engineered pathbreaking laws to promote their distinctive theory of political economy.
Hardcover 1997
The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume XV, 1860-1866
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edited by Linda Allardt
Edited by David W. Hill
Edited by Ruth H. Bennett
The Civil War is a pervasive presence in the journals in this volume. "The war searches character," Emerson wrote. Both his reading and his writing reflected his concern for the endurance of the nation, whose strength lay in the moral strength of the people. He read military biographies and memoirs, while turning again to Persian, Chinese, and Indian literature. The deaths of Clough, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson prompted him to reread their letters and journals, remembering and reappraising.
Hardcover 1982
Lincoln and the Court
Brian McGinty
In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict.
Hardcover 2008
Lincoln's Last Months
William C. Harris
Lincoln Prize winner William C. Harris turns to the last months of Abraham Lincoln's life in an attempt to penetrate this central figure of the Civil War, and arguably America's greatest president. Beginning with the presidential campaign of 1864 and ending with his shocking assassination, Lincoln's ability to master the daunting affairs of state during the final nine months of his life proved critical to his apotheosis as savior and saint of the nation.
Hardcover 2004
A Nation of Counterfeiters
Stephen Mihm
Prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by freewheeling capitalism and little government control. Mihm shows how eventually the older monetary system was dismantled, along with the counterfeit economy it sustained.
Hardcover 2007
One and Inseparable
Maurice G. Baxter
One and Inseparable traces the interrelated evolution of the public career and the private life of this imposing and controversial Yankee. Reading Baxter's lucid, moving biography it is possible to understand why Ralph Waldo Emerson so detested Daniel Webster but also called him "the competest man" produced by America.
Hardcover 1984
Race and Reunion
David W. Blight
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
Stories of Freedom in Black New York
Shane White
This book re-creates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture.
Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2007
To 'Joy My Freedom
Tera W. Hunter
In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter weaves a rich tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War South. Using a variety of sources, Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters.
Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998