"Good fences make good neighbors" comes from Robert Frost's poem Mending Walls which relates to traditions and rituals antedating the Romans. The god of boundaries, which they named Terminus, was not invented by the Romans, but he became one of their important household gods. Annually Terminus was honored in a ritual which not only reaffirmed boundaries but which also provided the occasion for predetermined traditional festivities among neighbors.

At the start of the Civil War, Knoxville, Tennessee, with a population of just over 4,000, was considered a prosperous metropolis little reliant on slavery. Although the surrounding countryside was predominantly Unionist in sympathy, Knoxville itself was split down the middle, with Union and Confederate supporters even holding simultaneous political rallies at opposite ends of the town's main street. Following Tennessee's secession, Knoxville soon became famous (or infamous) as a stronghold of stalwart Unionism, thanks to the efforts of a small cadre who persisted in openly denouncing the Confederacy. Throughout the course of the Civil War, Knoxville endured military occupation for all but three days, hosting Confederate troops during the first half of the conflict and Union forces throughout the remainder, with the transition punctuated by an extended siege and bloody battle during which nearly forty thousand soldiers fought over the town.
In Lincolnites and Rebels, Robert Tracy McKenzie tells the story of Civil War Knoxville-a perpetually occupied, bitterly divided Southern town where neighbor fought against neighbor. Mining a treasure-trove of manuscript collections and civil and military records, McKenzie reveals the complex ways in which allegiance altered the daily routine of a town gripped in a civil war within the Civil War and explores the agonizing personal decisions that war made inescapable. Following the course of events leading up to the war, occupation by Confederate and then Union soldiers, and the troubled peace that followed the war, Lincolnites and Rebels details in microcosm the conflict and paints a complex portrait of a border state, neither wholly North norSouth.
Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award, Museum of the Confederacy

In Soldiers from Experience, Eric Michael Burke examines the tactical behavior and operational performance of Major General William T. Sherman's Fifteenth US Army Corps during its first year fighting in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. Burke analyzes how specific experiences and patterns of meaning-making within the ranks led to the emergence of what he characterizes as a distinctive corps-level tactical culture. The concept-introduced here for the first time-consists of a collection of shared, historically derived ideas, beliefs, norms, and assumptions that play a decisive role in shaping a military command's particular collective approach on and off the battlefield. Burke shows that while military historians of the Civil War frequently assert that generals somehow imparted their character upon the troops they led, Sherman's corps reveals the opposite to be true. Contrary to long-held historiographical assumptions, he suggests the physical terrain itself played a much more influential role than rifled weapons in necessitating tactical changes. At the same time, Burke argues, soldiers' battlefield traumas and regular interactions with southern civilians, the enslaved, and freed people during raids inspired them to embrace emancipation and the widespread destruction of Rebel property and resources. An awareness and understanding of this culture increasingly informed Sherman's command during all three of his most notable late-war campaigns. Burke's study serves as the first book-length examination of an army corps operating in the Western Theater during the conflict. It sheds new light on Civil War history more broadly by uncovering a direct link between the exigencies of nineteenth-century land warfare and the transformation of US wartime strategy from "conciliation," which aimed to limit armed combat and casualties, to "hard war." Most significantly, Soldiers from Experience introduces a new theoretical construct of small unit-level tactical principles wholly absent from the rapidly growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the intricacies and influence of culture on military operations.

Excluding the capture of New Orleans, the military affairs in southeast Louisiana during the American Civil War have long been viewed by scholars and historians has having no strategic importance during the war. As such, no such serious effort to chronicle the war in that portion of the state has been attempted, except Pena's earlier book, Touched By War: Battles Fought in the Lafourche District (1998). That book covered the military affairs in southeast Louisiana that led to the five major battles fought in that region between fall 1862 and summer 1863. Beyond that point, little is chronicled, until now. In this thoroughly researched and authoritative book, Scarred By War: Civil War in Southeast Louisiana, Christopher Pena has revised and updated his earlier work and expanded the scope to include a study of the remaining two years of the war, a period filled with intense Confederate guerilla warfare. The literary result is a book that recounts the political, social, military, and economic aspects of the war as they played out in southeast Louisiana's bayou country.

The American Civil War was primarily a conflict of cultures, and slavery was the largest single cultural factor separating North and South. This collection of carefully selected memoirs, diaries, letters, and reminiscences of ordinary Northerners and Southerners who experienced the war as soldiers or civilians brings to life the conflict in culture, principles, attitudes, hopes, courage, and suffering of both sides. Woodworth, a Civil War historian, has selected a wide variety of moving first person accounts, each of which tells a story of a life as well as the attitudes of ordinary people and the real conditions of war and homefront. Woodworth presents the war in the words of those who lived it.

Contrasting selections will help the reader to see the war through the eyes of Northerners and Southerners as: soldiers prepare for war; women's lives change after the men go to war; soldiers on both sides experience the difficulties of camp life; sweethearts (the half-sister of Mary Todd Lincoln and her Confederate fiance) exchange heartfelt letters; a husband's letters and his wife's diary recount their love, his death in battle, and her deep loss, countered by her faith; soldiers and civilians recount the carnage of the war's devastating battles; and people on both sides reflect on the outcome of the war and its consequences to their way of life. The accounts contrast the writers' attitudes toward Northern and Southern society, the principles for which those societies stood, and the religious significance of the war. These accounts and the narrative discussion of the difference in culture will help readers to understand the Civil War as a conflict of cultures. Telling the story of the war as personal history makes the experience of the Civil War come alive for readers.

The Civil War changed the United States in many ways-economic, political, and social. Of these changes, none was more important than Emancipation. Besides freeing nearly 4 million slaves, it brought agricultural wage labor to a reluctant South and gave a vote to black adult males in the former slave states. It also offered former slaves of both sexes new opportunities in education and property ownership. Just as striking were the effects of the war on the United States Army. From late 1862 to the spring of 1865, the federal government accepted more than 180,000 black men as soldiers, something it had never done before on such a scale. Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains; and still others took part in major operations like the siege of Petersburg and the battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments garrisoned the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy."Freedom by the Sword" tells the story of these soldiers' recruitment, organization, and service. Because of the book's broad focus on every theater of the war and its concentration on what black soldiers actually contributed to Union victory, this volume stands alone among histories of the U.S. Colored Troops. Illustrations, maps, bibliographical note, abbreviations, index.

When runaway slave Anthony Burns was tracked to Boston by his owner Charles Suttle, the struggle over his fate became a focal point for national controversy. Boston, a hotbed of antislavery sentiment, provided the venue for the 1854 hearing that determined Burns's legal status, one of the most dramatic and widely publicized events in the long-running conflict over the issue of fugitive slaves.

Earl Maltz's compelling chronicle of this case shows how the violent emotions surrounding it played out at both the local and national levels, focusing especially on the awkward position in which trial judge Edward Loring found himself. A unionist who also supported enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, Loring was committed to the idea that each individual case should be decided by reference to neutral principles, which ultimately led him to remand Burns to Suttle's custody. Although, as Maltz argues, Loring's decision was indisputably correct on the facts and justified by existing legal precedent, it also ignited a firestorm of protest.

Maltz locates the Burns case in arguments over slavery going back to the Constitution's rendition clause, then follows it through two iterations of federal statutes in 1793 and 1850, a miniature legal war between the governors of Massachusetts and Virginia, and abolitionists' violent resistance to federal law. He also cites Loring's intellectual honesty and determination to apply the law as written, no matter what it might cost him.

As the last of a series of high-profile disputes in Massachusetts, the Burns case underscores the abolitionist attitude of many of the state's residents toward the fugitive slave issue, providing readers with a you-are-there view of an actual fugitive slave case hearing and encouraging them to grapple with the question of how a conscientious judge committed to the rule of law should act in such a case. It also sheds light on the political costs and consequences for any judicial official attempting to deliver a decision on such a controversial issue while surrounded by a hostile public.

A story as dramatic and compelling as any in our legal annals, "Fugitive Slave on Trial" dissects an important historical event as it sheds new light on the state of the Union in the mid-1850s and the events that led to its eventual dismemberment.

Lincoln, Rumi, Shams and Rabi'a in one volume? How is that possible? While three are Sufis, even Rumi and Shams are separated by a gulf of 400 years from Rabi'a. As for Rabi'a, she was at different times in her life, an orphan, a slave and a prostitute. And Lincoln? On top of another 500 years, the great statesman belongs to an entirely different civilization and religion. Where's the connection? "To the spiritual seeker, " Kehl and Walker contend,"The connection ... is unmistakable. Christ said "I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me." Sincere aspirants on the Spiritual Path recognize Masters; it can be no other way, as they are striving after the same reality." Lincoln, Rumi and Rabi'a are "linked by their unwavering pursuit of Spiritual Truth through Self Knowledge." The proof will be in the reading: In these three remarkable drama produced and performed during the fall and summer months of 2010 and 2011 the authors encourage readers to "search out the connections-rather than notice any supposed differences." 192 pages.