TRAVEL THROUGH A PIVOTAL TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Jeff Shaara, America's premier Civil War novelist, gives a remarkable guided tour of the ten Civil War battlefields every American should visit: Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg/Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, New Market, Chickamauga, the Wilderness/Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg/Appomattox. Shaara explores the history, the people, and the places that capture the true meaning and magnitude of the conflict and provides
- engaging narratives of the war's crucial battles
- intriguing historical footnotes about each site
- photographs of the locations-then and now
- detailed maps of the battle scenes
- fascinating sidebars with related points of interest
From Antietam to Gettysburg to Vicksburg, and to the many poignant destinations in between, Jeff Shaara's Civil War Battlefields is the ideal guide for casual tourists and Civil War enthusiasts alike.

Robert E. Lee: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works covers all aspects of his life and work, including individuals, places, and events that shaped Lee's career as a Virginian, soldier, and peacemaker. The extensive A to Z section includes several hundred entries. The bibliography provides a comprehensive list of publications concerning his life and work. *Includes a detailed chronology detailing Robert E. Lee's life, family, and work. *The A to Z section includes family members, campaigns in two different wars, cities as well as rivers and land areas of the time, military strategy and tactics, lieutenants and opponents, army organization, politics contending with war, plus seldom-mentioned topics such as geography, earthworks, desertion, personal health, and even the legendary "Rebel Yell." *The bibliography includes a list of publications concerning his life and work. *The index thoroughly cross-references the chronological and encyclopedic entries.

The Antebellum Press: Setting the Stage for Civil War reveals the critical role of journalism in the years leading up to America's deadliest conflict by exploring the events that foreshadowed and, in some ways, contributed directly to the outbreak of war. This collection of scholarly essays traces how the national press influenced and shaped America's path towards warfare. Major challenges faced by American newspapers prior to secession and war are explored, including: the economic development of the press; technology and its influence on the press; major editors and reporters (North and South) and the role of partisanship; and the central debate over slavery in the future of an expanding nation. A clear narrative of institutional, political, and cultural tensions between 1820 and 1861 is presented through the contributors' use of primary sources. In this way, the reader is offered contemporary perspectives that provide unique insights into which local or national issues were pivotal to the writers whose words informed and influenced the people of the time. As a scholarly work written by educators, this volume is an essential text for both upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates who study the American Civil War, journalism, print and media culture, and mass communication history.

Robert Emmett Curran's masterful treatment of American Catholicism in the Civil War era is the first comprehensive history of Roman Catholics in the North and South before, during, and after the war. Curran provides an in-depth look at how the momentous developments of these decades affected the entire Catholic community, including Black and indigenous Americans. He also explores the ways that Catholics contributed to the reshaping of a nation that was testing the fundamental proposition of equality set down by its founders. Ultimately, Curran concludes, the revolution that the war touched off remained unfinished, indeed was turned backward, in no small part by Catholics who marred their pursuit of equality with a truncated vision of who deserved to share in its realization.

Often called Leeas greatest triumph, the battle of Chancellorsville decimated the Union Eleventh Corps, composed of large numbers of German-speaking volunteers. Poorly deployed, the unit was routed by aStonewalla Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the aflighta of German immigrant troops. The impact on Americaas large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiersa letters, memoirs, and regimental records, Christian Keller reconstructs the battle and its aftermath from the German-American perspective, military and civilian. He offers a fascinating window into a misunderstood past, one where the German soldiersa valor has been either minimized or dismissed as cowardly. He critically analyzes the performance of the German regiments and documents the impact of nativism on Anglo-American and German-American reactionsaand on German self-perceptions as patriots and Americans. For German-Americans, the ghost of Chancellorsville lingered long, and Keller traces its effects not only on ethnic identity, but also on the dynamics of inclusion andassimilation in American life.

The second and concluding volume of Professor Ashworth's study of American antebellum politics, this book offers an exciting new interpretation of the origins of the Civil War. The volume deals with the politics of the 1850s and with the plunge into civil war. Professor Ashworth offers a new way of understanding the conflict between North and South and shows how northern free labor increasingly came into conflict with southern slavery as a result of both changes in the northern economy and the structural weaknesses of slavery.

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated action to aid in the recovery of runaway slaves and denied fugitives legal rights if they were apprehended, quickly became a focal point in the debate over the future of slavery and the nature of the union. In Making Freedom, R. J. M. Blackett uses the experiences of escaped slaves and those who aided them to explore the inner workings of the Underground Railroad and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, while shedding light on the political effects of slave escape in southern states, border states, and the North. Blackett highlights the lives of those who escaped, the impact of the fugitive slave cases, and the extent to which slaves planning to escape were aided by free blacks, fellow slaves, and outsiders who went south to entice them to escape. Using these stories of particular individuals, moments, and communities, Blackett shows how slave flight shaped national politics as the South witnessed slavery beginning to collapse and the North experienced a threat to its freedom.

In Early Struggles for Vicksburg, Tim Smith covers the first phase of the Vicksburg campaign (October 1862-July 1863), involving perhaps the most wide-ranging and complex series of efforts seen in the entire campaign. The operations that took place from late October to the end of December 1862 covered six states, consisted of four intertwined minicampaigns, and saw the involvement of everything from cavalry raids to naval operations in addition to pitched land battles in Ulysses S. Grant's first attempts to reach Vicksburg. This fall-winter campaign that marked the first of the major efforts to reach Vicksburg was the epitome of the by-the-book concepts of military theory of the day. But the first major Union attempts to capture Vicksburg late in 1862 were also disjointed, unorganized, and spread out across a wide spectrum. The Confederates were thus able to parry each threat, although Grant, in his newly assumed position as commander of the Department of the Tennessee, learned from his mistakes and revised his methods in later operations, leading eventually to the fall of Vicksburg. It was war done the way academics would want it done, but Grant figured out quickly that the books did not always have the answers, and he adapted his approach thereafter. Smith comprehensively weaves the Mississippi Central, Chickasaw Bayou, Van Dorn Raid, and Forrest Raid operations into a chronological narrative while illustrating the combination of various branches and services such as army movements, naval operations, and cavalry raids. Early Struggles for Vicksburg is accordingly the first comprehensive academic book ever to examine the Mississippi Central/Chickasaw Bayou campaign and is built upon hundreds of soldier-level sources. Massive in research and scope, this book covers everything from the top politicians and generals down to the individual soldiers, as well as civilians and slaves making their way to freedom, while providing analysis of contemporary military theory to explain why the operations took the form they did.

Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize of the Organization of American HistoriansAnother Civil War explores a tumultuous era of social change in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania. Because the Union Army depended on anthracite to fuel steam-powered factories, locomotives, and battle ships, coal miners in Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Carbon Counties played a vital role in the Northern war effort. However, that role was complicated by a history of ethnic, political, and class conflicts: after years of struggle in an unsafe and unstable industry, miners expected to use their wartime economic power to win victories for themselves and their families. Yet they were denounced as traitors and draft resisters, and their strikes were broken by Federal troops. Focusing on the social and economic impact of the Civil War on a group of workers central to that war, this dramatic narrative raises important questions about industrialization and work-place conflicts in the mid-1860s, about the rise of a powerful, centralized government, and about the ties between government and industry that shaped class relations. It traces the deep, local roots of wartime strikes in the coal regions and demonstrates important links between national politics, military power, and labor organization in the years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.

The turbulent years of 1861-1865 were especially rough for the people of Randolph County, North Carolina. Sentiment to stay in the Union was high, and remained so throughout the war, yet hundreds of Randolph County boys marched off to fight, many never to return. 'The Randolph Hornets', Company M, 22nd Regiment North Carolina Troops, earned a reputation for their grit and determination in battle. This history of the Randolph Hornets includes articles written by Sergeant John T. Turner in 1914 recalling his experiences with the company as well as a description of the company battle flag, its capture and its return to the county. A complete roster of the company includes genealogical information and short biographies for several of the men. The final chapter covers the local reenactment group based on the company.

They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of Bancroft Award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America–ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock–relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history.
In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.

The smoke had just cleared from the last volley of musketry at Gettysburg. Nearly 70 percent of the First Minnesota regiment lay dead or dying on the field -- one of the greatest losses of any unit engaged in the Civil War. Pale Horse at Plum Run is the study of this single regiment at this crucial moment in American history. Through painstaking research of firsthand accounts, eyewitness reports, and official records, Brian Leehan constructs a narrative remarkable for its attention to detail and careful reportage. Word of the First's heroic act at Gettysburg quickly spread along Union lines and back to Minnesota. Their stand late on July 2, 1863, stopped a furious rebel assault and saved the day for the Union. Emerging from the chaos of battle, however, firsthand reports contradicted each other. Confused officers and frightened soldiers told very different stories of the day's hearsay and camp gossip for their sources of information. All of this leaves the historical investigator to ask, what really happened that day at Plum Run? In order to answer that question, Leehan performs superlative historical detective work. By focusing on the men themselves -- and their accounts of the engagement -- he weaves together a narrative of the First's action on July 2 and 3. Those who escaped the scythe of battle the first day lived to play a pivotal role the next in rebuffing the most famous infantry assault in American military history, Pickett's Charge. By tracking the movements of individual soldiers over the field of battle, Leehan reconstructs in amazing detail the story of this remarkable band of soldiers. In his investigation of the battle Leehan raises important questions about how we can really know the truth about the past. In cogent appended essays, the author muses on the lack of standardised timekeeping in the mid-nineteenth century, on the nature of Civil War weaponry, and on the emergence of a heroic mythology after the war.

THE BATTLE OF LITTLE ROUND TOP AS IT HAS NEVER BEFORE SEEN-THROUGH THE EYES OF THE SOLDIERS WHO FOUGHT THERE
""Here is the real story of the epic fight for Little Round Top, shorn of the mythology long obscuring this pivotal Gettysburg moment. A vivid and eloquent book."" --Stephen W. Sears, author of Gettysburg
""Little Round Top has become iconic in Civil War literature and American memory. In the emotional recollection of our great war, if there was one speck on the landscape that decided a battle and the future of a nation, then surely this was it. The story of the July 2, 1863 struggle for that hill outside Gettysburg goes deeper into our consciousness than that, however. The men who fought for it then and there believed it to be decisive, and that is why they died for it. Glenn W. LaFantasie's Twilight at Little Round Top addresses that epic struggle, how those warriors felt then and later, and their physical and emotional attachment to a piece of ground that linked them forever with their nation's fate. This is military and social history at its finest."" --W.C. Davis, author of Lincoln's Men and An Honorable Defeat
""Few military episodes of the Civil War have attracted as much attention as the struggle for Little Round Top on the second day of Gettysburg. This judicious and engaging book navigates confidently through a welter of contradictory testimony to present a splendid account of the action. It also places events on Little Round Top, which often are exaggerated, within the broader sweep of the battle. All readers interested in the battle of Gettysburg will read this book with enjoyment and profit."" --Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War
""In his beautifully written narrative, Glenn LaFantasie tells the story of the battle for Little Round Top from the perspective of the soldiers who fought and died in July 1863. Using well-chosen quotes from a wide variety of battle participants, TWILIGHT puts the reader in the midst of the fight--firing from behind boulders with members of the 4th Alabama, running up the hillside into battle with the men of the 140th New York, and watching in horror as far too many men die. This book offers an elegy to the courage of those men, a meditation on the meaning of war, and a cautionary tale about the sacrifices nations ask of their soldiers and the causes for which those sacrifices are needed."" --Amy Kinsel, Winnrer of the 1993 Allan Nevins Prize for From These Honored Dead: Gettysburg in American Culture

Concerned with the logistical details of supplying the Army of the Potomac as it bogged down during the Peninsula campaign or of commandeering a steamboat to relieve the siege and get food to stranded soldiers at Chattanooga, Le Duc tells his story of mud-choked roads, incompetent commanders, and what he understands as the crucial factor necessary for the Union's success in battle: a well-supplied army. Through his close association with Generals McClellan and Meade, Hooker and Sherman, Le Duc learned to master the army's bureaucracy and overcome the hardships of trying to keep Union supplies on the move. His compelling memoir is unique in depicting the details of life in the Quartermaster Department. William G Le Duc (1823-1917) moved to the Minnesota Territory in 1850. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he volunteered into the Quartermaster Department and mustered out four years later as brevet brigadier general. He later served as the US Commissioner of Agriculture from 1877 until 1881 and retired to his home in Hastings, Minnesota.

Francis C. Barlow rose from lieutenant to general, suffered two serious wounds in combat, and played critical roles in such battles as Fair Oaks, Gettysburg (part of this battlefield is now named for him), and Spotsylvania. Barlow's war correspondence not only provide a rich description of his experiences in these actions but also offer insight into a civilian learning the realities of war as well as the burdens of command.Barlow was well connected with many eminent figures of his time, having spent part of his youth at Brook Farm, graduated in the Harvard College class of 1855, and had such friends as Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Ralph W. Emerson, Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., and John M. Forbes to watch over and promote his career. Winslow Homer spent considerable time with Barlow while making engravings for Harper's Weekly and later immortalized his friend in the painting, Prisoners From the Front. Barlow's letters not only offer information concerning such people but more importantly, help fill a gap in Civil War scholarship by providing a valuable window into Northern intellectual responses to the war.Jacket CopyHISTORY"Through explanatory passages and extensive notes that accompany Barlow's letters, Christian G. Samito sheds new light on the life of a major general. The letters, which span the entire war, trace the development of Northern intellectuals' perspective on the war and military life. The book illustrates how a young man, unskilled in military science, eventually became one of the North's strongest combat leaders, and a postwar politician."-Civil War Book Review Originally untrained in military science, Francis Channing Barlow ended the Civil War as one of the North's premiercombat generals. He played decisive roles in historic campaigns throughout the War and his letters are classic accounts of courage combat, and the burdens of command as experienced by one of the Union's fiercest officers.Born in Brooklyn, New York, Barlow enlisted in April 1861 at the age of twenty six, commanded the 61st New York Infantry regiment by April 1862, and found himself a general in command of a division by 1863. He played a key role at Fair Oaks, Antietam, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg, suffered two serious wounds in combat, and was left for dead at Gettysburg, where part of the battlefield is named after him. Barlow's war correspondence not only provides a rich description of his experiences in these actions but also offers insight into a civilian learning the realities of war.As a young intellectual, Barlow was also well connected with many eminent figures of his time. He spent part of his youth at Brook Farm, graduated first in his Harvard College class, and became a successful New York City lawyer by the time he enlisted. Among his friends he counted Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., and Winslow Homer's family. Transformed by his experiences in the War, Barlow entered politics and served as New York's Secretary of State and Attorney General. Superbly edited by Christian G. Samito, Barlow's letters not only illuminate the life of a talented battlefield commander; they also fill a gap in Civil War scholarship by providing a valuable window into Northern intellectual responses to the War.Christian G. Samito is the editor of Commanding Boston's Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts VolunteerInfantry and History of the Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.Cover illustration: Cover design: Fordham University PressNew Yorkwww.fordhampress.com

In May 1861, Jefferson Davis issued a general call for volunteers for the Confederate Army. Men responded in such numbers that 200,000 had to be turned away. Few of these men would have attributed their zeal to the cause of states' rights or slavery. As All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South makes clear, most southern men saw the war more simply as a test of their manhood, a chance to defend the honor of their sweethearts, fiances, and wives back home.
Drawing upon diaries and personal letters, Stephen Berry seamlessly weaves together the stories of six very different men, detailing the tangled roles that love and ambition played in each man's life. Their writings reveal a male-dominated Southern culture that exalted women as "repositories of divine grace" and treasured romantic love as the platform from which men launched their bids for greatness. The exhilarating onset of war seemed to these, and most southern men, a grand opportunity to fulfill their ambition for glory and to prove their love for women--on the same field of battle. As the realities of the war became apparent, however, the letters and diaries turned from idealized themes of honor and country to solemn reflections on love and home.
Elegant and poetic, All That Makes a Man recovers the emotional lives of unsung Southern men and women and reveals that the fiction of Cold Mountain mirrors a poignant reality. In their search for a cause worthy of their lives, many Southern soldiers were disappointed in their hopes for a Southern nation. But they still had their women's love, and there they would rebuild.
All that Makes a Man was a finalist 2004 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil WarScholarship, George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War.

Independence Day, 1861. The schooner S. J. Waring sets sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limps back into New York's frenzied harbor with the ship's black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has, almost unbelievably, been lost to history. Now reclaiming Tillman as the real American hero he was, historian Brian McGinty dramatically returns readers to that riotous, explosive summer of 1861, when the country was tearing apart at the seams and the Union army was in near shambles following a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run. Desperate for good news, the North was soon riveted by reports of an incident that occurred a few hundred miles off the coast of New York, where the Waring had been overtaken by a marauding crew of Confederate privateers. While the white sailors became chummy with their Southern captors, free black man William Tillman was perfectly aware of the fate that awaited him in the ruthless, slave-filled ports south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Stealthily biding his time until a moonlit night nine days after the capture, Tillman single-handedly killed three officers of the privateer crew, then took the wheel and pointed it home. Yet, with no experience as a navigator, only one other helper, and a war-torn Atlantic seaboard to contend with, his struggle had just begun. It took five perilous days at sea-all thrillingly recounted here-before the Waring returned to New York Harbor, where the story of Tillman's shipboard courage became such a tabloid sensation that he was not only put on the bill of Barnum's American Museum but also proclaimed to be the "first hero" of the Civil War. As McGinty evocatively shows, however, in the horrors of the war then engulfing the nation, memories of his heroism-even of his identity-were all but lost to history. As such, The Rest I Will Kill becomes a thrilling and historically significant work, as well as an extraordinary journey that recounts how a free black man was able to defy efforts to make him a slave and become an unlikely glimmer of hope for a disheartened Union army in the war-battered North.

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of the slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly free, they had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers. Remarkably, they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as pioneers of the American West equal to their Indian and other Plains sisters.

Focusing on middle-class women's contributions to the northern Civil War effort, Patricia Richard shows how women utilized their power as moral agents to shape the way men survived the ravages of war. Busy Hands investigates the ways in which white and African American women used images of family and domestic life in their relief efforts to counter the effects of prostitution, gambling, profanity, and drinking, threatening men's postwar civilian fitness.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs of Civil War nurses, sanitary workers, soldiers, and the soldiers' aid societies, Richard develops a new perspective on domestic influence on the war, as women sought to save soldiers from the dangers of the military world.

In this innovative book, Kyle Sinisi explores a little-known chapter in the history of American politics-the struggle between states and the federal government over the costs of fighting the Civil War. At stake was the disposition of some 8 million. Focusing on Kansas, Kentucky, and Missouri, Sinisi explores the process by which states were reimbursed by Washington in the most expensive intergovernmental contact of the 19th century. Recasting our understanding of governance, he shows that traditional sources of influence-courts and political parties-were less important in settling claims than adjutants general and private agents who fought for cash bonanzas. These power brokers helped shape the federal bureaucracy-and the process of state building.

Based on nearly five decades of research, this magisterial work is a biographical register and analysis of the people who most directly influenced the course of the Civil War, its high commanders. Numbering 3,396, they include the presidents and their cabinet members, state governors, general officers of the Union and Confederate armies (regular, provisional, volunteers, and militia), and admirals and commodores of the two navies. "Civil War High Commands" will become a cornerstone reference work on these personalities and the meaning of their commands, and on the Civil War itself.
Errors of fact and interpretation concerning the high commanders are legion in the Civil War literature, in reference works as well as in narrative accounts. The present work brings together for the first time in one volume the most reliable facts available, drawn from more than 1,000 sources and including the most recent research. The biographical entries include complete names, birthplaces, important relatives, education, vocations, publications, military grades, wartime assignments, wounds, captures, exchanges, paroles, honors, and place of death and interment.
In addition to its main component, the biographies, the volume also includes a number of essays, tables, and synopses designed to clarify previously obscure matters such as the definition of grades and ranks; the difference between commissions in regular, provisional, volunteer, and militia services; the chronology of military laws and executive decisions before, during, and after the war; and the geographical breakdown of command structures. The book is illustrated with 84 new diagrams of all the insignias used throughout the war and with 129 portraits of the most important high commanders.

Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party was the first party built on opposition to slavery to win on the national stage-but its victory was rooted in the earlier efforts of under-appreciated antislavery third parties. Liberty Power tells the story of how abolitionist activists built the most transformative third-party movement in American history and effectively reshaped political structures in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As Corey M. Brooks explains, abolitionist trailblazers who organized first the Liberty Party and later the more moderate Free Soil Party confronted formidable opposition from a two-party system expressly constructed to suppress disputes over slavery. Identifying the Whigs and Democrats as the mainstays of the southern Slave Power's national supremacy, savvy abolitionists insisted that only a party independent of slaveholder influence could wrest the federal government from its grip. A series of shrewd electoral, lobbying, and legislative tactics enabled these antislavery third parties to wield influence far beyond their numbers. In the process, these parties transformed the national political debate and laid the groundwork for the success of the Republican Party and the end of American slavery.

British naval officer Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin, with his great love, Diana Villiers, speed home to England with news of their latest victory over the Americans. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the trio run into trouble when they attract the menacing attention of two American privateers. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks-and the highs and lows of the love affair between Maturin and Villiers-is as tense, stirring, and unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O'Brian has written in his epic series.