A historical investigation into the political and ideological foundations of the "miseducation of the Negro" in America, this timely and provocative volume explores the men and ideas that helped shape educational and societal apartheid from the Civil War to the new millennium. It is a study of how big corporate power uses private wealth to legislate, shape unequal race relations, broker ideas, and define "acceptable" social change. Drawing on little-known biographies of White power brokers who shaped Black education, William Watkins explains the structuring of segregated education that has plagued the United States for much of the 20th century. With broad and interdisciplinary appeal, this book is written in a language accessible to lay people and scholars alike.

"A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction" is an extraordinary collection of 23 essays addressing the key topics and themes of the most divisive era in United States history. These original essays by top scholars in the field are organized chronologically into three parts: "Sectional Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War," "The Civil War and American Society," and "Reconstruction and the New Nation." Each essay is an interpretive summary of the key literature in the field, and places the topic in historical context. Contributors include bibliographies and suggest future directions of the historiography. This volume provides students, scholars, and informed general readers of Civil War and Reconstruction history with a valuable guide to their research and teaching.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth. Moreover, Levin shows that belief in the existence of black Confederate soldiers largely originated in the 1970s, a period that witnessed both a significant shift in how Americans remembered the Civil War and a rising backlash against African Americans' gains in civil rights and other realms. Levin also investigates the roles that African Americans actually performed in the Confederate army, including personal body servants and forced laborers. He demonstrates that regardless of the dangers these men faced in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, their legal status remained unchanged. Even long after the guns fell silent, Confederate veterans and other writers remembered these men as former slaves and not as soldiers, an important reminder that how the war is remembered often runs counter to history.

Experience the Civil War's most eerie occurrences, spooky events, unsolved mysteries, and myths and legends related and debunked. From the legend of the Yankee "human shield" behind Nathan Bedford Forrest's saddle to the unexplained sinking of the Hunley, Civil War Myths and Legends makes history fun and pulls back the curtain on some of the most fascinating and compelling stories of the war that almost tore America apart.

In this unique examination of Civil War leadership, W. J. Wood looks at the tactical and strategic problems that threatened to overwhelm untried Civil War generals and the pragmatic strategies, born of necessity, that they developed to solve them. Focusing on three decisive battles involving six generals, Wood provides the background necessary to understand the problems confronting commanders on both sides of the war, then looks at the campaign of Cedar Mountain, directed by Stonewall Jackson and Nathaniel Banks the battle of Chickamauga, where Confederate Army leader Braxton Bragg and Union General William Rosecrans faced each other the battle of Nashville, where Jon Bell Hood led his Southern troops against George H. Thomas and his Union army. Deftly describing the art of war these men developed, an art that provides paradigms for military leaders to this day, Wood demonstrate why Civil War remains a topic of never-diminishing interest.

Marking the fortieth anniversary of Charles Reagan Wilson's classic Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, this volume collects essays by such scholars as Carolyn ReneE Dupont, Sandy Dwayne Martin, Keith Harper, and Wilson himself to show how various aspects of the Lost Cause ideology persist into the present. The Enduring Lost Cause examines the lasting legacy of a belief system that sought to vindicate the antebellum South and the Confederate fight to preserve it. Contributors treat such topics as symbolism, the perpetuation of the Lost Cause in education, and the effects of the Lost Cause on gender and religion, as well as examining ways the ideology has changed over time.The twelve essays gathered here help the reader understand the development of a cultural phenomenon that affected generations of southerners and northerners alike, arising out of the efforts of former Confederates to make sense of their defeat, even at the expense of often mythologizing it. From fresh looks at towering figures of the Lost Cause (to reexamining the role of African Americans in disseminating the ideology (in the form of a religious explanation for suffering), the essayists carefully analyze the tensions between the past and the present, true belief and commercialization, continuity and change. Ultimately the narrative of the Lost Cause persists worldwide, merging with American exceptionalism to become a pillar of the conservative wing of US politics, as well as a lasting cultural legacy. The Enduring Lost Cause provides a window into this world, helping us to understand the present in the context of the past.

The diminutive Union XII Corps found significant success on the field at Antietam. Its soldiers swept through the East Woods and the Miller Cornfield, permanently clearing both of Confederates, repelled multiple Southern assaults against the Dunker Church plateau, and eventually secured a foothold beyond the Dunker Church in the West Woods. This important piece of high ground had been the Union objective all morning, and its occupation threatened the center and rear of Gen. Robert E. Lee's embattled Army of Northern Virginia. Federal leadership largely ignored this signal achievement and the opportunity it presented. The XII Corps' achievement is especially notable given its string of disappointments and hardships in the months leading up to Antietam. Cedar Mountain to Antietam: A Civil War Campaign History of the Union XII Corps, July - September 1862 by M. Chris Bryan is the story of the formation of this often luckless command as the II Corps in Maj. Gen. John Pope's Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862. Bryan explains in meticulous detail how the corps came within a whisker of inflicting a crushing defeating against Maj. Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson at Cedar Mountain on August 9, suffered through the hardships of Pope's campaign before and after the Battle of Second Manassas, and its resurgence after entering Maryland and joining the reorganized Army of the Potomac. The men of this small corps, who would later wear a five-pointed star as their insignia, went on to earn a solid reputation in the Army of the Potomac at Antietam that would only grow during the battles of 1863.Bryan's study, a hybrid unit history and leadership and character assessment, puts the XII Corps' actions in proper context by providing significant and substantive treatment to its Confederate opponents. His unique study, based on extensive archival research, newspapers, and other important resources, is a compelling story of a little-studied yet consequential corps and fills a gaping historiographical gap that has longed needed to be filled.

The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate a slaveholding culture as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals in his new book, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day. Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war's cause, Reconstruction, and slavery-as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies-were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederacy as one of history's greatest armies, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of "black Confederates" was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as "loyal slaves." The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.

For all the literature about Civil War military operations and leadership, precious little has been written about strategy, particularly in the eastern theater. The Civil War in the East takes a fresh look at military operations in this sector and the assumptions that shaped them. With opposing capitals barely a hundred miles apart and with the Chesapeake Bay-Tidewater area offering Union generals the same sorts of opportunities that Confederate leaders sought in the Shenandoah Valley, geography shaped military operations in fundamental ways. Presidents, politicians, and the press peeked over the shoulders of military commanders, some of whom were not reluctant to engage in their own intrigues as they promoted their fortunes. The location of the respective capitals raised the stakes of victory and defeat. At a time when people viewed war in terms of decisive battles, the anticipation of victory followed by disappointment and persistent strategic stalemate characterized the course of events in the East. About the Author BROOKS D. SIMPSON is ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. He is the author of several books, including America's Civil War (Harlan Davidson, 1996) and Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865 (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). He has written numerous articles and appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, and PBS's The American Experience. He lives in Gilbert, Arizona.

'My dear, I don't give a damn.'

Margaret Mitchell’s page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope and loss set against the tense historical background of the American Civil War.

The lovers at the novel’s centre – the selfish, privileged Scarlett O’Hara and rakish Rhett Butler – are magnetic: pulling readers into the tangled narrative of a struggle to survive that cannot be forgotten.

WINNER OF NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND PULITZER PRIZE

'For sheer readability I can think of nothing it must give way before' The New Yorker

'What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under?’ Margaret Mitchell

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Massachusetts native Gilbert Thompson joined the regular army, which assigned him to the engineer battalion, a unit that provided critical support for the Union military effort in building bridges and roads and surveying and producing maps. While serving, Thompson kept a journal that eventually filled three volumes. The author's early education in a utopian community called Hopedale left him well read, affording a journal peppered with literary allusions. Once the war ended, Corporal Thompson added some postwar reflections to create a unified single volume, which editor Mark A. Smith has carefully arranged so that the reader can clearly distinguish between Thompson's contemporary accounts and his postwar reminiscences. An accomplished artist and topographer, Thompson illustrated his journals, adding depth to his narrative with portraits of key figures, drawings of ordinary scenes such as soldiers playing chess, and sights of the war. Additionally, he collected photographs both during and after the war, many of which are included.Thompson's wartime musings and postwar recollections have much to offer. Few diaries contain glimpses into the workings of a highly specialized unit such as the engineer battalion, and Thompson's skills in depicting daily camp life in both words and pictures provide a distinctive look at the Union Army during the Civil War as well as an insightful look into the human condition. In his 1879 introduction, Thompson writes, 'I wonder how I wrote as much and as well, and am thankful I was so fortunate as to have the opportunity to do so.' Students of the Civil War will feel fortunate he did.

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition combines the two most important African American slave narratives into one volume.
Frederick Douglass's Narrative, first published in 1845, is an enlightening and incendiary text. Born into slavery, Douglass became the preeminent spokesman for his people during his life; his narrative is an unparalleled account of the dehumanizing effects of slavery and Douglass's own triumph over it. Like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery, and in 1861 she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, now recognized as the most comprehensive antebellum slave narrative written by a woman. Jacobs's account broke the silence on the exploitation of African American female slaves, and it remains crucial reading. These narratives illuminate and inform each other. This edition includes an incisive Introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah and extensive annotations.

"From the Trade Paperback edition.

In an incisive analysis of over two dozen clauses as well as several 'unwritten' rules and practices, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War shows how the Constitution aggravated the sectional conflict over slavery to the point of civil war. Going beyond the fugitive slave clause, the three-fifths clause, and the international slave trade clause, Michael F. Conlin demonstrates that many more constitutional provisions and practices played a crucial role in the bloody conflict that claimed the lives of over 750,000 Americans. He also reveals that ordinary Americans in the mid-nineteenth century had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of the provisions and the methods of interpretation of the Constitution. Lastly, Conlin reminds us that many of the debates that divide Americans today were present in the 1850s: minority rights vs. majority rule, original intent vs. a living Constitution, state's rights vs. federal supremacy, judicial activism vs. legislative prerogative, secession vs. union, and counter-majoritarianism vs. democracy.

The Young Americans were a nationalist movement within the Democratic Party made up of writers and politicians associated with the New York periodical, the Democratic Review. In this revealing book, Mark Power Smith explores the ways in which-in dialogue with its critics-the movement forged contrasting visions of American nationalism in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Frustrated, fifty years after independence, by Britain's political and cultural influence on the United States, the Young Americans drew on a wide variety of intellectual authorities-in the fields of literature, political science, phrenology and international law-to tie popular sovereignty for white men to the universalist idea of natural rights. The movement supported a noxious program of foreign interventionism, racial segregation, and cultural nationalism. What united these policies was a new view of national allegiance: one that saw democracy and free trade not as political privileges but as natural rights for white men. Despite its national reach, this view of the Union inadvertently turned Northern and Southern states against each other, helping to cultivate the conditions for the Civil War. In the end, the Young America movement was ultimately consumed by the sectional ideologies it had brought into being.

At the height of the Civil War in 1863, the Union instated the first-ever federal draft. Patriotism By Proxy develops a new understanding of the connections between American literature and American lives by focusing on this historic moment when the military transformed both. Paired with the Emancipation Proclamation, the 1863 draft inaugurated new relationships between the nation and its citizens. A massive bureaucratic undertaking, it redefined the American people as a population, laying bare social divisions as wealthy draftees hired substitutes to serve in their stead. The draft is the context in which American politics met and also transformed into a new kind of biopolitics, and these substitutes reflect the transformation of how the state governed American life. Censorship and the suspension of habeas corpus prohibited free discussions over the draft's significance, making literary devices and genres the primary means for deliberating over the changing meanings of political representation and citizenship. Assembling an extensive textual and visual archive, Patriotism by Proxy examines the draft as a cultural formation that operated at the nexus of political abstraction and embodied specificity, where the definition of national subjectivity was negotiated in the interstices of what it means to be a citizen-soldier. It brings together novels, poems, letters, and newspaper editorials that show how Americans discussed the draft at a time of censorship, and how the federal draft changed the way that Americans related to the state and to each other.

During the four years of the Civil War, the border between eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia was highly contested territory, alternately occupied by both the Confederacy and the Union. Though this territory was sparsely populated, the geography of the region made it a desirable stronghold for future tactical maneuvers. As the war progressed, the Cumberland Gap quickly became the target of invasion and occupation efforts of both armies, creating a chaos that would strain not only the soldiers but all those who called the area their home.

Contested Borderland examines the features of the region's geography and the influence of the attacks on borderlands caught in the crossfire of the Union and Confederate forces. The land surrounding the Kentucky-Virginia border contained valuable natural resources and geographic features considered essential to each army's advancement and proliferation. While the Appalachian Mountains barred travel through large parts of the region, the gaps allowed quick passages through otherwise difficult terrain and thus became hotly contested areas. Brian D. McKnight explores the tensions between the accomplishment of military goals and the maintenance of civilian life in the region.

With Kentucky remaining loyal to the Union and Virginia seceding to the Confederacy, populations residing between the two states faced pressure to declare loyalty to one side. Roadside towns found themselves the frequent hosts of soldiers from both sides, while more remote communities became shelters for those wishing to remain uninvolved in the conflict. Instead of committing themselves to either cause, many individuals claimed a neutral stance or feigned dedication to whichever side happened to occupy their land.

The dual occupation of the Union and Confederate armies consequentially divided the borderland population, creating hostilities within the region that would persist long after the war's conclusion. Contested Borderland is the first Civil War study exclusively devoted to the border separating eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. McKnight's unprecedented geographical analysis of military tactics and civilian involvement provides a new and valuable dimension to the story of a region facing the turmoil of war.

In this never before published diary, 29-year-old surgeon James Fulton transports readers into the harsh and deadly conditions of the Civil War as he struggles to save the lives of the patients under his care. Fulton joined a Union army volunteer regiment in 1862, only a year into the Civil War, and immediately began chronicling his experiences in a pocket diary. Despite his capture by the Confederate Army at Gettysburg and the confiscation of his medical tools, Fulton was able to keep his diary with him at all times. He provides a detailed account of the next two years, including his experiences treating the wounded and diseased during some of the most critical campaigns of the Civil War and his relationships with soldiers, their commanders, civilians, other health-care workers, and the opposing Confederate army. The diary also includes his notes on recipes for medical ailments from sore throats to syphilis. In addition to Fulton's diary, editor Robert D. Hicks and experts in Civil War medicine provide context and additional information on the practice and development of medicine during the Civil War, including the technology and methods available at the time, the organization of military medicine, doctor-patient interactions, and the role of women as caregivers and relief workers. Civil War Medicine: A Surgeon's Diary provides a compelling new account of the lives of soldiers during the Civil War and a doctor's experience of one of the worst health crises ever faced by the United States.

This compelling, highly readable book focuses on the men who shaped the events that led to secession and the Civil War. Secessionists tore at the bonds that bound Americans to one another and their government as they maligned Northerners and found sinister intent in federal policy. But equally as adamant on the opposite side were the determined abolitionists and others in the North who sought to hold the Union together. Tariffs, the loss of political power, and the antislavery movement were all taking their toll on the South, but it took specific individuals and groups to bring to action the causes they believed in and thus to alter the course of history. The Men of Secession and Civil War, 1859-1861 traces the period from John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry raid to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and the subse-quent secession of the Upper South states in April 1861. The cast of characters in this book includes abolitionists John Brown and Salmon P. Chase; President Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas; Andrew Johnson, whom Lincoln named his vice president in 1864; secessionists Jefferson Davis, Roger Taney, and Barnwell Rhett; John Breckenridge, the 1860 presidential nominee of the Southern Democratic Party; and Tennessee Senator John Bell. The Men of Secession and Civil War is a useful volume for Civil War courses.

At 3 a.m. on February 21, 1865, a band of 65 Confederate horsemen slowly made its way down Greene Street in Cumberland, Maryland. Thinking the riders were disguised Union scouts, the few Union soldiers out that bitterly cold morning paid little attention to them. In the meantime, over 3,500 Yankee soldiers peacefully slept. Within thirty minutes McNeill's Rangers had kidnapped Union generals George Crook and Benjamin Kelley from their hotels and spirited them out of town. Despite a determined effort by Union pursuers to intercept the kidnappers, the Rangers reached safety deep in the South Fork River Valley, over fifty miles away. Not long afterward, the generals were shipped to Richmond's Libby Prison. Southern general John B. Gordon later called the mission "one of the most thrilling incidents of the war." In September 1862, John Hanson McNeill recruited a company of troopers for Col. John D. Imboden's 1st Virginia Partisan Rangers. In early 1863, Imboden took most of his men into the regular army, but McNeill and his son Jesse offered their men an opportunity to continue in independent service; seventeen soldiers joined them. In the coming months, other young hotspurs enlisted in McNeill's Rangers. Operating mostly in the Potomac Highlands of what is now eastern West Virginia, the Rangers bedeviled the Union troops guarding the B&O Railroad line. Favoring American Indian battle tactics, they ambushed patrols, attacked wagon trains, and heavily damaged railroad property and rolling stock. Phantoms of the South Fork is the thrilling result of Steve French's carefully researched study of primary source material, including diaries, memoirs, letters, and period newspaper articles. Additionally, he traveled throughout West Virginia, western Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, and the Shenandoah Valley following the trail of Captain McNeill and his "Phantoms of the South Fork.