Books published by University of Georgia Press

During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers' bodies were transformed into "dead heaps of ruins," novel sights in the southern landscape. This is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change.

Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South. Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed.

In Georgia during the Great Depression, jobless workers united with the urban poor, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. In a collective effort that cut across race and class boundaries, they confronted an unresponsive political and social system and helped shape government policies. This book lets us understand the movement.

Explores the war through chapters on its vocabulary, music, literature, and film. This work contains a catalog of soldier slang that reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one's sense of absurdity.

In this first book-length environmental history of the American Civil War, Lisa M. Brady argues that ideas about nature and the environment were central to the development and success of Union military strategy. Deftly combining environmental and military history, this book explores an intriguing side of America's greatest conflict.

Part of the three volumes on South Carolina women, this title spans the long period from the sixteenth century through the Civil War era. It features the religious, racial, ethnic, and class diversity of the women. It contains essays on plantation mistresses, overseers' wives, nonslaveholding women from the upcountry and slave women.

Using perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theory and drawing on war propaganda, popular advertising, government records, and hundreds of accounts written by women in the 1940s, McEuen examines how extensively women's bodies and minds became "battlegrounds" in the U.S. fight for victory in World War II.

For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalising forces of cultural reunion. In truth, says Natalie Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful representation of the backward Problem South.

In 1983 Calvin Johnson Jr was handed down a life sentence for rape and related crimes. He spent sixteen years behind bars before he was freed in 1999 after DNA testing conclusively proved him not guilty. This book tells the unforgettable story of Johnson's unrelenting quest for justice against incredible odds and offers many lessons about freedom.

The author writes of the Americas, the Caribbean, and other sites of conquest and colonization, mingling the personal and the political, the present and the past on pages filled with the language of parting, remembering, promise and loss.