Books in the Conflicting Worlds: New Dimens series

While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict's similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was "one among many" such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War's place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and cultural issues and events. In The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism, Niels Eichhorn and Duncan A. Campbell explore the conflict from this perspective, taking a transnational and comparative approach, with a particular focus on the period from the 1830s to the 1870s. Eichhorn and Campbell examine the development of nationalism and its frequent manifestation, secession, by comparing the American experience with that of several other nations, including Germany, Hungary, and Brazil. They compare the Civil War to the Crimean and Franco-German wars to determine whether the American conflict was the first modern war. To gauge the potential of foreign intervention in the Civil War, they look to the time's developing international debate on the legality of intercession and mediation in other nations' insurgencies. Using the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes, Eichhorn and Campbell suggest the extent to which the United States was an imperial project. To examine realpolitik, they study four vastly different practitioners--Otto von Bismarck, Louis Napoleon, Count Cavour, and Abraham Lincoln. Finally, they compare emancipation in the United States to that in Peru and the end of forced servitude in Russia, closing with a comparison of the memorialization of the Civil War with the experiences of other post-emancipation societies and an examination of how other nations mythologized their past conflicts and ignored uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of reconciliation. The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism avoids the limitations of American exceptionalism, making it the first genuine comparative and transnational study of the Civil War in an international context.

"Cecily Zander's "The Army under Fire" addresses two essential questions about the Civil War and its aftermath. First, what was the extent of anti-militarism in the Civil War era, and who were its proponents? Second, what consequences did political opposition to the professional army have on the war, Reconstruction, and postbellum western expansion? Zander suggests that the principal promotors of an anti-army ideology were the members of the Republican Party-the same men charged with overseeing the Union war effort between 1861 and 1865, as well as the military reconstruction of the nation in the decade that followed the collapse of the Confederacy. While scholars have long appreciated the Republican Party's anti-slavery roots, this study is the first to argue that anti-slavery attitudes developed in concert with a visceral anti-army ideology. Zander's work contains several historiographical interventions in the fields of Civil War history, nineteenth-century political history, and the history of the American West. She suggests that the Republican Party advanced an anti-army political philosophy in tandem with their anti-slavery ideology. Over almost two decades, they stalled legislation supporting the army, cut military funding, and reduced the institution's size. Zander's work counters narratives of accelerated western expansion supported by a more powerful army after the Civil War. She also advances a revised timeline for Reconstruction, suggesting that Republicans rapidly reduced their interest in supporting that policy in the South via military force between 1870 and 1872, which means the party's ideological commitment to the national reunification project ended four years earlier than the traditional date of 1876. Historians interested in the middle decades of the nineteenth century are likely to find "Republicans and Regulars in the Civil War Era" worthy of attention, especially scholars invested in the debates surrounding the chronological and geographic reframing of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Because of the notoriety of many of the work's most important characters-from Jefferson Davis and William Seward to Thaddeus Stevens and Zachariah Chandler, as well as William Tecumseh Sherman, Phillip Sheridan, and Ulysses S. Grant-general readers are also likely to be interested in this study"--

"J. Matthew Ward's Garden of Ruins is a social and military history of Civil War-era Louisiana. Delving deep into primary sources, Ward examines military occupation and state coercion from Union and Confederate authorities, concluding that despite the revolutionary potential of occupation, it was a conservative state mechanism that replicated much of the antebellum social order in the state. He suggests that social stability during wartime, and ultimately victory itself, developed from the capacity of military powers to secure their territory, governing powers, and civilian populations. White and Black residents, in turn, pressed Union and Confederate powers for supplies, security, and redress of grievances. Union troops occupied southern Louisiana beginning in May 1862, expanding their reach for the remainder of the war. During that occupation, Union forces relied on a comprehensive occupation structure that included military actions, social regulations, destabilization of slavery, and the creation of a complex bureaucracy. Struggles between Union forces and civilians, Ward suggests, reveal how occupation became a war on southern households and culture. Before occupation and in unoccupied regions of Louisiana, he shows that little functional difference existed between Confederate governmental and military forces. By examining the coercive policies of the state's Confederate government alongside civilian efforts to patrol the loyalty of their communities, Ward concludes that the Confederate war effort was also a joint production, one that urges historians to consider warfare as more than battles and strategy-it was a social event that revealed the underlying connections between people and state. Garden of Ruins reveals the Civil War, state-building, and democracy itself as contingent processes through which Louisianans shaped the world around them. It also shows that power during the conflict and immediately afterward was a collaborative production between occupying military forces and civilians. Ward's study is certain to be of interest to historians and general readers interested in the Civil War homefront in Louisiana"--

Military uniforms, badges, flags, and other material objects have been used to represent the identity of Americans throughout history. In The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox examines the material culture of America's bloodiest conflict, offering a deeper understanding of the war and its commemoration. Cox's analysis traces the influence of sewn materials throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction as markers of power and authority for both the Union and the Confederacy. These textiles became cherished objects by the turn of the century, a transition seen in veterans replacing wartime uniforms with new commemorative attire and repatriating Confederate battle flags. Looking specifically at the creation of material culture by various commemoration groups, including the Grand Army of the Republic, the Woman's Relief Corps, the United Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Cox reveals the ways that American society largely accepted their messages, furthering the mission of their memory work. Through the lens of material culture, Cox sheds new light on a variety of Civil War topics, including preparation for war, nuances in relationships between Native American and African American soldiers, the roles of women, and the rise of postwar memorial societies.

Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli's Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln. Exploring female characters' backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers' imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln's life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln; his lost loves, Ann Rutledge and Mary Owens; and his wife and widow, Mary Todd Lincoln. Later, while inspecting Lincoln's legacy, they focus on the 1930s child actor Shirley Temple and the 1950s movie star Marilyn Monroe, who had a well-publicized fascination with the sixteenth president. Wetta and Novelli's work is the first to deal extensively with the women in Lincoln's life, both those who interacted with him personally and those appearing on screen. It is also among the first works to examine how scholarly and popular biography influenced depictions of Lincoln, especially in film.