Daughters of Israel, Daughters of the South: Southern Jewish Women and Identity in the Antebellum and Civil War South examines southern Jewish womanhood during the Antebellum and Civil War Eras. This study finds that in the Protestant South southern Jewish women created and maintained unique American Jewish identities through their efforts in education, writing, religious observance, paid and unpaid labour, and relationships with whites and African-American slaves This book examines how these women creatively fought proselytisation, challenged anti- Semitism, maintained a distinctive southern Judaism, promoted their own status and legitimacy as southerners, and worked diligently as Confederate ambassadors.

During the Civil War, neither the Union nor the Confederate army could have operated without effective transportation systems. Moving men, supplies, and equipment required coordination on a massive scale, and Earl J. Hess's Civil War Logistics offers the first comprehensive analysis of this vital process. Utilizing an enormous array of reports, dispatches, and personal accounts by quartermasters involved in transporting war materials, Hess reveals how each conveyance system operated as well as the degree to which both armies accomplished their logistical goals. In a society just realizing the benefits of modern travel technology, both sides of the conflict faced challenges in maintaining national and regional lines of transportation. Union and Confederate quartermasters used riverboats, steamers, coastal shipping, railroads, wagon trains, pack trains, cattle herds, and their soldiers in the long and complicated chain that supported the military operations of their forces. Soldiers in blue and gray alike tried to destroy the transportation facilities of their enemy, firing on river boats and dismantling rails to disrupt opposing supply lines while defending their own means of transport. According to Hess, Union logistical efforts proved far more successful than Confederate attempts to move and supply its fighting forces, due mainly to the North's superior administrative management and willingness to seize transportation resources when needed. As the war went on, the Union's protean system grew in complexity, size, and efficiency, while that of the Confederates steadily declined in size and effectiveness until it hardly met the needs of its army. Indeed, Hess concludes that in its use of all types of military transportation, the Federal government far surpassed its opponent and thus laid the foundation for Union victory in the Civil War.

In this path-breaking work on the American Civil War, Joan E. Cashin explores the struggle between armies and civilians over the human and material resources necessary to wage war. This war 'stuff' included the skills of white Southern civilians, as well as such material resources as food, timber, and housing. At first, civilians were willing to help Confederate or Union forces, but the war took such a toll that all civilians, regardless of politics, began focusing on their own survival. Both armies took whatever they needed from human beings and the material world, which eventually destroyed the region's ability to wage war. In this fierce contest between civilians and armies, the civilian population lost. Cashin draws on a wide range of documents, as well as the perspectives of environmental history and material culture studies. This book provides an entirely new perspective on the war era.

At a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memories is the first comprehensive account of how and why Americans have selectively remembered, and forgotten, this watershed conflict since its conclusion in 1865. Drawing on an array of textual and visual sources as well as a wide range of modern scholarship on Civil War memory, Robert J. Cook charts the construction of four dominant narratives by the ordinary men and women, as well as the statesmen and generals, who lived through the struggle and its tumultuous aftermath. Part One explains why the Yankee victors' memory of the "War of the Rebellion" drove political conflict into the 1890s, then waned with the passing of the soldiers who had saved the republic. It also touches on the leading role southern white women played in the development of the racially segregated South's "Lost Cause"; explores why, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had embraced a powerful reconciliatory memory of the Civil War; and details the failed efforts to connect an emancipationist reading of the conflict to the fading cause of civil rights. Part Two demonstrates the Civil War's capacity to thrill twentieth-century Americans in movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It also reveals the war's vital connection to the black freedom struggle in the modern era. Finally, Cook argues that the massacre of African American parishioners in Charleston in June 2015 highlighted the continuing relevance of the Civil War by triggering intense nationwide controversy over the place of Confederate symbols in the United States. Written in vigorous prose for a wide audience and designed to inform popular debate on the relevance of the Civil War to the racial politics of modern America, Civil War Memories is required reading for informed Americans today.

This book traces how and why the secession of the South during the American Civil War was accomplished at ground level through the actions of ordinary men. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Lawrence T. McDonnell works to connect small events in new ways - he places one company of the secessionist Minutemen in historical context, exploring the political and cultural dynamics of their choices. Every chapter presents little-known characters whose lives and decisions were crucial to the history of Southern disunion. McDonnell asks readers to consider the past with fresh eyes, analyzing the structure and dynamics of social networks and social movements. He presents the dissolution of the Union through new events, actors, issues, and ideas, illuminating the social contradictions that cast the South's most conservative city as the radical heart of Dixie.

Think you know the Civil War? You don't know the full story until you read The Politically Incorrect GuideTM to the Civil War Bestselling author and former Conservative Book Club editor H. W. Crocker III offers a quick and lively study of America's own Iliad--the Civil War--in this provocative and entertaining addition to The Politically Incorrect GuideTM series. In The Politically Incorrect GuideTM to the Civil War Crocker profiles eminent--and colorful--military generals including the noble Lee, the controversial Sherman, the indefatigable Grant, the legendary Stonewall Jackson, and the notorious Nathan Bedford Forrest. He also includes thought-provoking chapters such as "The Civil War in Sixteen Battles You Should Know" and the most devastatingly politically incorrect chapter of all, "What If the South Had Won?" Along the way, he reveals a huge number of little-known truths, including why Robert E. Lee had a higher regard for African Americans than Lincoln did; how, if there had been no Civil War, the South would have abolished slavery peaceably (as every other country in the Western Hemisphere did in the nineteenth century); and how the Confederate States of America might have helped the Allies win World War I sooner. Bet your history professor never told you: * Leading Northern generals--like McClellan and Sherman--hated abolitionists * Bombing people "back to the Stone Age" got its start with the Federal siege of Vicksburg * General Sherman professed not to know which was "the greater evil": slavery or democracy * Stonewall Jackson founded a Sunday school for slaves where he taught them how to read * General James Longstreet fought the Battle of Sharpsburg in his carpet slippers This is the Politically Incorrect GuideTM that every Civil War buff and Southern partisan--and everyone who is tired of liberal self-hatred that vilifies America's greatest heroes--must have on his bookshelf.

In the Spring of 1844, a fiery political conflict erupted over the admission of Texas into the Union, a hard-fought and bitter controversy that profoundly changed the course of American history. Indeed, as Joel Silbey argues in A Fierce Political Storm, the battle over Texas marked the crucial moment when partisan differences were transformed into a North-vs-South antagonism, and the momentum towards Civil War leaped into high gear. One of America's renowned political historians, Silbey offers a swiftly paced and compelling narrative of the Texas imbroglio, with an exceptional cast of characters, including John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and Martin Van Buren. He shows in particular how the Van Buren bloc of the Democratic Party-the "Barnburners"-stood at the heart the annexation controversy. We see how a series of unexpected moves, some planned, some inadvertent, sparked a crisis that intensified and crystallized the North-South divide, which then became, for the first time, a driving force in national affairs. Sectionalism, Silbey shows, had often been intense, but rarely widespread and generally well contained by other forces on the political landscape. But after Texas statehood, the political landscape was transformed into one sculpted by implacable sectional differences. The bitter discord over annexation-with slavery the core issue-was the seed from which America's great crisis of union grew, leading ultimately to Southern secession and Civil War. The Texas controversy released demons that were never again pushed back into the bottle. With subtlety, great care, and much imagination, Joel Silbey shows that this brief political struggle became, in the words of an Alabama congressman, "the greatest question of the age"-indeed, a pivotal moment in American history.

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.
Contains an extensive selection of writings and illustrations on the American Civil War
Reflects society and culture as well as the politics and key battles of the Civil War
Reproduces and links primary and secondary sources to encourage exploration of the material
Includes editorial introductions and study questions to aid understanding

Whether or not the United States "won" the war of 1812, two engagements that occurred toward the end of the conflict had an enormous influence on the development of American identity: the successful defenses of the cities of Baltimore and New Orleans. Both engagements bolstered national confidence and spoke to the elan of citizen soldiers and their militia officers. The Battle of New Orleans-perhaps because it punctuated the war, lent itself to frontier mythology, and involved the larger-than-life figure of Andrew Jackson-became especially important in popular memory. In Glorious Victory, leading War of 1812 scholar Donald R. Hickey recounts the New Orleans campaign and Jackson's key role in the battle. Drawing on a lifetime of research, Hickey tells the story of America's "forgotten conflict." He explains why the fragile young republic chose to challenge Great Britain, then a global power with a formidable navy. He also recounts the early campaigns of the war-William Hull's ignominious surrender at Detroit in 1812; Oliver H. Perry's remarkable victory on Lake Erie; and the demoralizing British raids in the Chesapeake that culminated in the burning of Washington. Tracing Jackson's emergence as a leader in Tennessee and his extraordinary success as a military commander in the field, Hickey finds in Jackson a bundle of contradictions: an enemy of privilege who belonged to Tennessee's ruling elite, a slaveholder who welcomed free blacks into his army, an Indian-hater who adopted a native orphan, and a general who lectured his superiors and sometimes ignored their orders while simultaneously demanding unquestioning obedience from his men. Aimed at students and the general public, Glorious Victory will reward readers with a clear understanding of Andrew Jackson's role in the War of 1812 and his iconic place in the postwar era.

This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

First published in 1974, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock grew out of a magazine article coauthored by Jan Reid. His first book was a sensation in Texas. It portrayed an Austin-based live music explosion variously described as progressive country, cosmic cowboys, and outlaw country. The book has been hailed as a model of how to write about popular music and the life of performing musicians. Written in nine months, Reid's account focuses on predecessors of the 1960s and the swarm of newborn venues, the most enduring one the justly famed Armadillo World Headquarters; profiles of singer-songwriters that included Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Martin Murphey, Steven Fromholz, B.W. Stevenson, Willis Alan Ramsey, Bobby Bridger, Rusty Wier, Kinky Friedman, and the one who became an international star and one of America's most treasured performers, Willie Nelson; and the rowdy heat-stricken debut of Willie's Fourth of July Picnics. Though Reid has resisted the writerly trend of specialization in his career, his debut brought him back to popular music and musicians' lives in Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Texas Tornado: The Music and Times of Doug Sahm, and now a related novel, The Song Leader. The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock is a landmark of popular culture in Texas and the Southwest. Readers will be glad to once more have it back.

Between 1861 and 1865, both the Confederate South and Southern Italy underwent dramatic processes of nation-building, with the creation of the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, in the midst of civil wars. This is the first book that compares these parallel developments by focusing on the Unionist and pro-Bourbon political forces that opposed the two new nations in inner civil conflicts. Overlapping these conflicts were the social revolutions triggered by the rebellions of American slaves and Southern Italian peasants against the slaveholding and landowning elites. Utilizing a comparative perspective, Enrico Dal Lago sheds light on the reasons why these combined factors of internal opposition proved fatal for the Confederacy in the American Civil War, while the Italian Kingdom survived its own civil war. At the heart of this comparison is a desire to understand how and why nineteenth-century nations rose and either endured or disappeared.