Books in the Civil War America series

On June 19, 1864, the Confederate cruiser Alabama and the USS Kearsarge faced off in the English Channel outside the French port of Cherbourg. About an hour after the Alabama fired the first shot, it began to sink, and its crew was forced to wave the white flag of surrender. This title offers the stories of these two celebrated Civil War warships.

Few events in Civil War history have generated such deliberate myth-making as the retreat that ended at Appomattox. This book aims to show that during the final week of the war in Virginia, Lee's troops were more numerous yet far less faithful to their cause than has been suggested.

Provides a comprehensive narrative and statistical analysis of many key aspects of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Serving as a companion to Glatthaar's General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse, this book presents Glatthaar's supporting data and major conclusions in extensive and extraordinary detail.

Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America

Most Civil War generals were graduates of West Point, and many of them helped transform the US Army from what was little better than an armed mob that performed poorly during the War of 1812 into the competent fighting force that won the Mexican War. This title offers a portrait of the American army from 1814 to the end of the Civil War.

Few Southern elites gave more to the Confederate cause or suffered more in its defeat than General Wade Hampton III of South Carolina. This book reveals Hampton's critical role during Reconstruction as a conservative white leader, governor, US senator, and Redeemer; and his heroic image in the minds of white Southerners.

Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays and Emancipation Day celebrations in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His examination demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remain contentious.

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Jane E. Schultz provides a first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront.

At Cedar Mountain on August 9, 1862, Stonewall Jackson exercised independent command of a campaign for the last time. From diaries, reminiscences, letters and newspaper articles, Robert Krick reconstructs a detailed account of the confrontation at Cedar Mountain and Jackson's victory there.

Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict

Sweeping away many of the myths that have long surrounded Pickett's Charge, the author offers the history of the most famous military action of the Civil War. He transforms exhaustive research into a narrative account of the assault from both Union and Confederate perspectives, analyzing its planning, execution, aftermath, and legacy.

Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, this book looks at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia's last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery.

Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41,000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 of them died. The author contends that virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis beyond the captors' control.

A comprehensive picture of western North Carolina society during the Civil War. Men and women, masters and slaves, planters and yeomen, soldiers and civilians, Confederates and Unionists, bushwhackers and home guardsmen, Democrats and Whigs - all their stories are told here.

Drawing on an array of published and archival sources, Christian McWhirter analyses the myriad ways music influenced popular culture in the years surrounding the US civil war and discusses its deep resonance for both whites and blacks, South and North.

New Orleans was the largest city in the Confederacy, protected in part by Fort Jackson, which was just 65 miles down the Mississippi River. On April 27, 1862, Confederate soldiers at Fort Jackson rose up in mutiny against their commanding officers. This book examines various sources to determine why the soldiers rebelled at such a decisive moment.

William Lowndes Yancey (1814-63) was one of the leading secessionists of the Old South. This biography examines his personality and political life. Born in Georgia but raised in the North by a fiercely abolitionist stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother, Yancey grew up believing that abolitionists were cruel, meddling, and hypocritical.

The Tar Heels were one of the hardest-fighting units in the Army of Northern Virginia, Hess draws on letters, diaries, memoirs and service records to explore the camp life, social backgrounds and political attitudes as well as chronicling their military engagements.

Prussian-born cartographer Oscar Hinrichs was a key member of Stonewall Jackson's staff, and worked alongside such prominent Confederate leaders as Joe Johnston and Jubal Early. Hinrichs's detailed wartime journals, published here for the first time, shed new light on mapmaking as a tool of 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.

This volume extends the discussion of Civil War controversies far past the death of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865. Contributors address, among other topics, Walt Whitman's poetry, the handling of the Union and Confederate dead, the treatment of disabled and destitute northern veterans, Ulysses S. Grant's imposing tomb, and Hollywood's long relationship with the Lost Cause narrative.

During the secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61, Southerners spoke out and wrote prolifically on the subject, publishing their views in pamphlets that circulated widely. In this valuable reference work, Jon Wakelyn has collected twenty representative examples of this long-overlooked literature.

American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings?all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and--on the other side of the Atlantic--London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations.Contributors:Matt D. Childs, University of South CarolinaAnne Eller, Yale UniversityRichard Huzzey, University of LiverpoolHoward Jones, University of AlabamaPatrick J. Kelly, University of Texas at San AntonioRafael de Bivar Marquese, University of Sao PauloErika Pani, College of MexicoHilda Sabato, University of Buenos AiresSteve Sainlaude, University of Paris IV SorbonneChristopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts UniversityJay Sexton, University of Oxford

The first major modern edition of the wartime correspondence of General William T. Sherman, this volume features more than 400 letters written between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the day Sherman bade farewell to his troops in 1865. Together, they trace Sherman's rise from obscurity to become one of the Union's most famous and effective warriors.

American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings?all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future. These struggles were all part of a vast web, connecting not just Washington and Richmond but also Mexico City, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Rio de Janeiro and--on the other side of the Atlantic--London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome. This volume breaks new ground by charting a hemispheric upheaval and expanding Civil War scholarship into the realms of transnational and imperial history. American Civil Wars creates new connections between the uprisings and civil wars in and outside of American borders and places the United States within a global context of other nations.Contributors:Matt D. Childs, University of South CarolinaAnne Eller, Yale UniversityRichard Huzzey, University of LiverpoolHoward Jones, University of AlabamaPatrick J. Kelly, University of Texas at San AntonioRafael de Bivar Marquese, University of Sao PauloErika Pani, College of MexicoHilda Sabato, University of Buenos AiresSteve Sainlaude, University of Paris IV SorbonneChristopher Schmidt-Nowara, Tufts UniversityJay Sexton, University of Oxford

In a groundbreaking, comprehensive history of the Army of Northern Virginia's retreat from Gettysburg in July 1863, Kent Masterson Brown draws on previously untapped sources to chronicle the massive effort of General Robert E. Lee and his command as they sought to move people and equipment, scavenged supplies through hostile territory, and planned the army's next moves.

The Civil War retains a powerful hold on the American imagination, with each generation since 1865 reassessing its meaning and importance in American life. This volume collects twelve essays by leading Civil War scholars who demonstrate how the meanings of the Civil War have changed over time.

This personal account of the American Civil War by General Edward Porter Alexander, provides an assessment of people and events. Alexander was involved in nearly all of the great battles of the East and had frequent contact with the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia.