Books in the The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era series

Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery

With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the post-US Civil War reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

Chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence.

Argues that we can see the US Civil War anew by understanding it as a revolution. More than a fight to preserve the Union and end slavery, the conflict refashioned a nation, in part by remaking its Constitution. More than a struggle of brother against brother, it entailed remaking an Atlantic world that centred in surprising ways on Cuba and Spain.

Exploring gender relations during the Civil War, this book compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. It finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home.

When the Civil War began, Northern soldiers and civilians sought a framework to help make sense of the chaos that confronted them. Many turned first to Antoine Henri Jomini's classic military text, Summary of the Art of War. As Carol Reardon shows, Jomini's work was only one voice in what ultimately became a lively and contentious national discourse about how the North should conduct war.

Blending military and cultural history, Lorien Foote's rich and insightful book sheds light on how Americans fought over what it meant to be civilized and who should be extended the protections of a civilized world.