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Books > Humanities > History > American history > 1800 to 1900
A renowned collector of Civil War photographs and a prodigious researcher, Ronald S. Coddington combines compelling archival images with biographical stories that reveal the human side of the war. This third volume in his series on Civil War soldiers contains previously unpublished photographs of African American Civil War participants--many of whom fought to secure their freedom. During the Civil War, 200,000 African American men enlisted in the Union army or navy. Some of them were free men and some escaped from slavery; others were released by sympathetic owners to serve the war effort. "African American Faces of the Civil War" tells the story of the Civil War through the images of men of color who served in roles that ranged from servants and laborers to enlisted men and junior officers. Coddington discovers these portraits-- "cartes de visite," ambrotypes, and tintypes--in museums, archives, and private collections. He has pieced together each individual's life and fate based upon personal documents, military records, and pension files. These stories tell of ordinary men who became fighters, of the prejudice they faced, and of the challenges they endured. "African American Faces of the Civil War" makes an important contribution to a comparatively understudied aspect of the war and provides a fascinating look into lives that helped shape America.
The judgment that Abraham Lincoln is the finest president in the history of the United States borders on self-evident. This status tends to disable the very possibility of a more critical understanding or appreciation, one that does not work, explicitly or implicitly, within the taken-for-granted frame of his greatness. Still, America is not blind to or ignorant of Lincoln's shortcomings. Rather it is in part because of these shortcomings that Lincoln is revered. Thus, if the country needs to legitimize a problematic course of action, it is Lincoln to whom it turns. Lincoln, America reminds itself, suspended habeas corpus; jailed political opponents; suppressed speech; held racist views; and pursued racist policies. The Lincoln that America "idealizes" is a thoroughly ambiguous figure. Simultaneously, the country tends to downplay or conveniently overlook the underside of Lincoln, part of a larger political pattern in which it proclaims its exceptionalism while indulging the very worst as it conducts its political affairs. It is time to take Lincoln's ambiguity seriously, which might put America in position to recognize that one reason it routinely falls short of its democratic principles and commitments is that it may not, just like Lincoln, fully believe in them. In Lincoln: The Ambiguous Icon, Steven Johnston explores Lincoln's complicated political thought and practice, reinterpreting the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural, and some of the many manifestations of Lincoln in film, monuments, and memorials that conceal-but also reveal-the terrible ambiguity of this marginally understood American figure.
Native Southerners lived in vibrant societies, rich in tradition and cultural sophistication, for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Over the ensuing centuries, Native Southerners adapted to the presence of Europeans, endeavouring to incorporate them into their social, cultural, and economic structures. However, by the end of the American Revolutionary War, Indigenous communities in the American South found themselves fighting for their survival. This collection chronicles those fights, revealing how Native Southerners grappled with colonial legal and political pressure; discussing how Indigenous leaders navigated the politics of forced removal; and showing the enduring strength of Native Americans who evaded removal and remained in the South to rebuild communities during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This book was originally published as a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History.
A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (originally published in 1887) by pioneer African American historian George Washington Williams remains a classic text in African American literature and Civil War history. In this powerful narrative, Williams, who served in the U.S. Colored Troops, tells the battle experiences of the almost 200,000 black men who fought for the Union cause. Determined to document the contributions of his fellow black soldiers, and to underscore the valor and manhood of his race, Williams gathered his material from the official records of U.S. and foreign governments, and from the orderly books and personal recollections of officerscommanding Negro troops during the American Civil War. The new edition of this important text includes an introductory essay by the award-winning historian John David Smith. In his essay, Smith narrates and evaluates the book's contents, analyzes its reception by contemporary critics, and evaluates Williams's work within the context of its day and its place in current historiography.
Paying Freedom's Price provides a comprehensive yet brief and readable history of the role of African Americans-both slave and free-from the decade leading up to the Civil War until its immediate aftermath. Rather than focusing on black military service, the white-led abolitionist movement, or Lincoln's emergence as the great emancipator, Escott concentrates on the black military and civilian experience in the North as well as the South. He argues that African Americans-slaves, free Blacks, civilians, soldiers, men, and women- played a crucial role in transforming the sectional conflict into a war for black freedom. The book is organized chronologically as well as thematically. The chronological organization will help readers understand how the Civil War evolved from a war to preserve the Union to a war that sought to abolish slavery, but not racial inequality. Within this chronological framework, Escott provides a thematic structure, tracing the causes of the war and African American efforts to include abolition, black military service, and racial equality in the wartime agenda. Including a timeline, selected primary sources, and an extensive bibliographic essay, Escott's book will be provide a superb starting point for students and general readers who want to explore in greater depth this important aspect of the Civil War and African American history.
"The American Nation: Primary Sources "resumes the narrative begun
in its companion volume, "The American Republic" which covered the
first eight decades of U.S. history, ending at the onset of the
Civil War. "The American Nation" continues the story through
America's entrance into World War II.
Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America is a short biography aimed at a general audience, but because of its short length, it will also be suitable for use on college courses in American history. The biography will concentrate on Lincoln's years as president, with particular emphasis upon his role in determining the course and outcome of the Civil War.
Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's 1946 autobiography The Making of a Southerner is considered a classic testament of a white southerner's commitment to racial justice in a culture where little was to be found. Lumpkin's unpublished novel Eli Hill, which was discovered in Lumpkin's papers after her death, contributes to the same struggle by imaginatively re-creating a historical figure and a moment in the violent white resistance to Reconstruction. Born to enslaved parents in York County, South Carolina, Elias Hill (1819-1872) learned to read and write and became a popular Baptist minister. Owing to his influence, Hill was one of many victims of a series of vicious attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. After testifying before a congressional committee that emigration was the only solution, Hill and 135 other formerly enslaved people emigrated to Liberia. Lumpkin had trained as a sociologist and historian to use archival sources and data in arguing for socioeconomic change. In her autobiography, she uses the lens of an individual life, her own, to understand how racism was inculcated in white children and how they could free themselves from its grip. With Eli Hill, she turns to imagination, informed by archival research, to put an African American man at the center of a story about Reconstruction. In curating this important work of historical recovery for use in the classroom, Bruce Baker and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall have included the full text of the original manuscript and an introduction that contextualizes the novel in both its historical setting and its creation.
The Civil War unleashed a torrent of claims for equality - in the chaotic years following the war, former slaves, women's rights activists, farmhands, and factory workers all engaged in the pursuit of the meaning of equality in America. This contest resulted in experiments in collective action, as millions joined leagues and unions. In Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1886, Charles Postel demonstrates how taking stock of these movements forces us to rethink some of the central myths of American history. Despite a nationwide push for equality, egalitarian impulses oftentimes clashed with one another. These dynamics get to the heart of the great paradox of the fifty years following the Civil War and of American history at large: Waves of agricultural, labour, and women's rights movements were accompanied by the deepening of racial discrimination and oppression. Herculean efforts to overcome the economic inequality of the first Gilded Age and the sexual inequality of the late-Victorian social order emerged alongside Native American dispossession, Chinese exclusion, Jim Crow segregation, and lynch law. Now, as Postel argues, the twenty-first century has ushered in a second Gilded Age of savage socioeconomic inequalities. Convincing and learned, Equality explores the roots of these social fissures and speaks urgently to the need for expansive strides toward equality to meet our contemporary crisis.
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee. Written in 1834, this autobiography is like a tall tale of the life of a frontiersman, and established Davy Crockett as a larger-than-life American hero.
General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating "March to the Sea" in 1864 burned a swath through the cities and countryside of Georgia and into the history of the American Civil War. As they moved from Atlanta to Savannah-destroying homes, buildings, and crops; killing livestock; and consuming supplies-Sherman and the Union army ignited not only southern property, but also imaginations, in both the North and the South. By the time of the general's death in 1891, when one said "The March," no explanation was required. That remains true today. Legends and myths about Sherman began forming during the March itself, and took more definitive shape in the industrial age in the late-nineteenth century. Sherman's March in Myth and Memory examines the emergence of various myths surrounding one of the most enduring campaigns in the annals of military history. Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown provide a brief overview of Sherman's life and his March, but their focus is on how these myths came about-such as one description of a "60-mile wide path of destruction"-and how legends about Sherman and his campaign have served a variety of interests. Caudill and Ashdown argue that these myths have been employed by groups as disparate as those endorsing the Old South aristocracy and its "Lost Cause," and by others who saw the March as evidence of the superiority of industrialism in modern America over a retreating agrarianism. Sherman's March in Myth and Memory looks at the general's treatment in the press, among historians, on stage and screen, and in literature, from the time of the March to the present day. The authors show us the many ways in which Sherman has been portrayed in the media and popular culture, and how his devastating March has been stamped into our collective memory.
Outstanding in appearance, discipline, and precision at drill, the Third Minnesota Volunteer Infantry was often mistaken for a regular army unit. Rebel Colonel Ponder described the regiment as ""the hardest lot of men he'd ever run against."" Betrayed by its higher commanders, the Third Minnesota was surrendered to Nathan Bedford Forrest on July 13, 1862, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Through letters, personal accounts of the men, and other sources, author Joseph C. Fitzharris recounts how the Minnesotans, prisoners of war, broken in spirit and morale, went home and found redemption and renewed purpose fighting the Dakota Indians. They were then sent south to fight guerrillas along the Tennessee River. In the process, the regiment was forged anew as a superbly drilled and disciplined unit that participated in the siege of Vicksburg and in the Arkansas Expedition that took Little Rock. At Pine Bluff, Arkansas, sickness so reduced its numbers that the Third was twice unable to muster enough men to bury its own dead, but the men never wavered in battle. In both Tennessee and Arkansas, the Minnesotans actively supported the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) and provided many officers for USCT units. The Hardest Lot of Men follows the Third through occupation to war's end, when the returning men, deeming the citizens of St. Paul insufficiently appreciative, spurned a celebration in their honor. In this first full account of the regiment, Fitzharris brings to light the true story long obscured by the official histories illustrating aspects of a nineteenth-century soldier's life - enlisted and commissioned alike - from recruitment and training to the rigors of active duty. The Hardest Lot of Men gives us an authentic picture of the Third Minnesota, at once both singular and representative of its historical moment.
"I will always be somebody." This assertion, a startling one from a nineteenth-century woman, drove the life of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only American woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. President Andrew Johnson issued the award in 1865 in recognition of the incomparable medical service Walker rendered during the Civil War. Yet few people today know anything about the woman so well-known--even notorious--in her own lifetime. Kaminski shares a different way of looking at the Civil War, through the eyes of a woman confident she could make a contribution equal to that of any man. This part of the story takes readers into the political cauldron of the nation's capital in wartime, where Walker was a familiar if notorious figure. Mary Walker's relentless pursuit of gender and racial equality is key to understanding her commitment to a Union victory in the Civil War. Her role in the women's suffrage movement became controversial and the US Army stripped Walker of her medal, only to have the medal reinstated in 1977.
Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans regarded the United States as an exceptional democratic republic that stood apart from a world seemingly riddled with revolutionary turmoil and aristocratic consolidation. Viewing themselves as distinct from and even superior to other societies, Americans considered their nation an unprecedented experiment in political moderation and constitutional democracy. But as abolitionism in England, economic unrest in Europe, and upheaval in the Caribbean and Latin America began to influence domestic affairs, the foundational ideas of national identity also faced new questions. And with the outbreak of civil war, as two rival governments each claimed the mantle of civilized democracy, the United States' claim to unique standing in the community of nations dissolved into crisis. Could the Union chart a distinct course in human affairs when slaveholders, abolitionists, free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood? In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage.
The Annual Editions series is designed to provide convenient inexpensive access to a wide range of current articles from some of the most respected magazines, newspapers and journals published today. Annual Editions are updated on a regular basis through a continuous monitoring of over 300 periodical sources. The articles selected are authored by prominent scholars, researchers, and commentators writing for a general audience. Each Annual Editions volume has a number of features designed to make them especially valuable for classroom use; including a brief overview for each unit, as well as Learning Outcomes, Critical Thinking questions, and Internet References to accompany each article. Go to the McGraw-Hill Create(R) Annual Editions Article Collection at http: //www.mcgrawhillcreate.com/annualeditions to browse the entire collection. Select individual Annual Editions articles to enhance your course, or access and select the entire Maier-Sarti: Annual Editions: United States History, Volume 2: Reconstruction Through the Present, 23/e book here at http: //create.mheducation.com/createonline/index.html#qlink=search%2Ftext%3Disbn:1259657248 for an easy, pre-built teaching resource. Visit http: //create.mheducation.com for more information on other McGraw-Hill titles and special collections.
When thousands of African Americans freed themselves from slavery during the American Civil War and launched the larger process of emancipation, hundreds of northern antislavery reformers traveled to the federally occupied South to assist them. The two groups brought views and practices from their backgrounds that both helped and hampered the transition out of slavery. While enslaved, many Blacks assumed a certain guarded demeanor when dealing with whites. In freedom, they resented northerners' paternalistic attitudes and preconceptions about race, leading some to oppose aid programs-included those related to education, vocational training, and religious and social activities-initiated by whites. Some interactions resulted in constructive cooperation and adjustments to curriculum, but the frequent disputes more often compelled Blacks to seek additional autonomy. In an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between the formerly enslaved and northern reformers, John Cimprich shows how the unusual circumstances of emancipation in wartime presented new opportunities and spawned social movements for change yet produced intractable challenges and limited results. Navigating Liberty serves as the first comprehensive study of the two groups' collaboration and conflict, adding an essential chapter to the history of slavery's end in the United States.
What happens when partisanship is pushed to its extreme? In With Ballots and Bullets, Nathan P. Kalmoe combines historical and political science approaches to provide new insight into the American Civil War and deepen contemporary understandings of mass partisanship. The book reveals the fundamental role of partisanship in shaping the dynamics and legacies of the Civil War, drawing on an original analysis of newspapers and geo-coded data on voting returns and soldier enlistments, as well as retrospective surveys. Kalmoe shows that partisan identities motivated mass violence by ordinary citizens, not extremists, when activated by leaders and legitimated by the state. Similar processes also enabled partisans to rationalize staggering war casualties into predetermined vote choices, shaping durable political habits and memory after the war's end. Findings explain much about nineteenth century American politics, but the book also yields lessons for today, revealing the latent capacity of political leaders to mobilize violence.
Major General Emory Upton (1839-1881) served in all three branches of the U.S. military during the American Civil War. Lauded as a war hero, he later earned acclaim for his influence on military reforms, which lasted well beyond his lifetime. An account of Upton's life is not complete, however, without a look into his brief, yet passionate, marriage to Emily Norwood Martin (1846-1870). This edition of Emory and Emily's letters unveils the private life of a brilliant Civil War personality. It also introduces readers to the devout young woman who earned the general's fanatic devotion before her untimely death from tuberculosis. Until now, only a few of the couple's intimate letters have been published. During the years he spent editing and publishing Emory Upton's correspondence, Salvatore G. Cilella Jr. deliberately set aside the general's voluminous letters to his wife. Unfortunately, as Cilella explains in his editorial notes, Emily's letters to Emory did not survive, but he was able to draw on the rich trove of letters Emily wrote to her mother and father while on her honeymoon and during her stays in Key West, Nassau, and Atlanta. Together, both sets of letters form a poignant narrative of the general's tender love for his new wife and her reciprocal affection as they attempted to create a normal life together despite her declining health. The life of an army wife could be grueling, and despite her declining health, Emily longed to perform the role expected of her. It was not meant to be. Unwittingly, she and Emory chose the worst places for her to recover - Key West and Nassau - where the high humidity and heat must have exacerbated her difficulty breathing. She died in Nassau, far away from her husband. Eleven years later, racked by a sinus tumor and likely still grieving from his lost love, Upton committed suicide at the age of forty-one. Till Death Do Us Part offers a powerful - and poignant - tale of two star-crossed lovers against the backdrop of post-Civil War America. In addition, the volume gives readers a fascinating glimpse into gender roles and marital relations in the nineteenth century.
In the summer of 1864, the American Civil War had been dragging on for over three years with no end in sight. Things had not gone well for the Union, and the public blamed the president for the stalemate against the Confederacy and for the appalling numbers of killed and wounded. Lincoln was thoroughly convinced that without a favorable change in the trajectory of the war he would have no chance of winning a second term against former Union general George B. McClellan, whom he had previously dismissed as commander of the Army of the Potomac. This vivid, engrossing account of a critical year in American history examines the events of 1864, when the course of American history might have taken a radically different direction. It's no exaggeration to say that if McClellan had won the election, everything would have been different-McClellan and the Democrats planned to end the war immediately, grant the South its independence, and let the Confederacy keep its slaves. What were the crucial factors that in the end swung public sentiment in favor of Lincoln? Johnson focuses on the battlefield campaigns of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. While Grant was waging a war of attrition with superior manpower against the quick and elusive rebel forces under General Robert E. Lee, Sherman was fighting a protracted battle in Georgia against Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston. But then the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, made a tactical error that would change the whole course of the war. This lively narrative, full of intriguing historical facts, brings to life an important series of episodes in our nation's history. History and Civil War buffs will not want to put down this real-life page-turner.
This innovative study presents a new, integrated view of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the history of the western United States. Award-winning historians such as Steven Hahn, Martha Sandweiss, William Deverell, Virginia Scharff, and Stephen Kantrowitz offer original essays on lives, choices, and legacies in the American West, discussing the consequences for American Indian nations, the link between Reconstruction and suffrage movements, and cross-border interactions with Canada and Mexico. In the West, Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wide range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Histories of Reconstruction in the South ignore the connections to previous occupation efforts and citizenship debates in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction period within one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century. Publishing on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, this collection brings eminent historians into conversation, looking at the Civil War from several Western perspectives, and delivers a refreshingly disorienting view intended for scholars, general readers, and students. Published in Cooperation with the William P Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
The Whirlwind of War builds on the great themes and follows many of the important figures who were introduced in The Approaching Fury. Stephen B. Oates's riveting narrative brings to life the complex and destructive war that is the central event in American history. He writes in the first person, assuming the viewpoints of several of the principal figures: the rival presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; the rival generals, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman; the great black abolitionist, editor, and orator, Frederick Douglass; the young Union battlefield nurse, Cornelia Hancock; the brilliant head of the Chicago Sanitary Commission and cocreator of the northern Sanitary Fair, Mary Livermore; the Confederate socialite and political insider, Mary Boykin Chesnut; the assassin, John Wilkes Booth; and the greatest poet of the era, Walt Whitman, who speaks in the coda about the meaning of war and Lincoln's death.
There is an extraordinary range of material in this anthology, from
Lincoln's Gettysburg address to a contemporary account of a visit
from the Ku Klux Klan. The primary sources reproduced are both
visual and written, and the secondary materials present a
remarkable breadth and quality of relevant scholarship.
This volume analyzes the cultural and intellectual impact of the war, considering how it reshaped Americans' spiritual, cultural, and intellectual habits. The Civil War engendered an existential crisis more profound even than the changes of the previous decades. Its duration, scale, and intensity drove Americans to question how they understood themselves as people. The chapters in the third volume distinguish the varied impacts of the conflict in different places on people's sense of themselves. Focusing on particular groups within the war, including soldiers, families, refugees, enslaved people, and black soldiers, the chapters cover a broad range of ways that participants made sense of the conflict as well as how the war changed their attitudes about gender, religion, ethnicity, and race. The volume concludes with a series of essays evaluating the ways Americans have memorialized and remembered the Civil War in art, literature, film, and public life.
The author of an acclaimed account of the lives of children in the Civil War, Marten here provides a more comprehensive introduction to the civilian history of the Civil War. Concise, vividly written chapters describe the home front through the lives of individuals and the histories of events and institutions in the North and South. The stories are organized around five broad themes: the Northern home front, the Southern home front, children, African Americans, and the war's aftermath. The case studies feature voices of the famous, like Edmund Riffin and Booker T. Washington, but more often they offer the testimony of ordinary men, women, and children. A superb blend of traditional narrative, case studies, and individual stories, Civil War America is a valuable resource for students and their teachers seeking to understand the many ways in which the Civil War was truly a people's war. |
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