Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was the embodiment of Southern contradictions. He was a slave owner who fought and died, at least in part, to perpetuate slavery, yet he founded an African-American Sunday School and personally taught classes for almost a decade. For all his sternness and rigidity, Jackson was a deeply thoughtful and incredibly intelligent man. But his reputation and mythic status, then and now, was due to more than combat success. In a deeply religious age, he was revered for a piety that was far beyond the norm. How did one man meld his religion with the institution of slavery? How did he reconcile it with the business of killing, at which he so excelled? In SEARCHING FOR STONEWALL JACKSON, historian Ben Cleary examines not only Jackson's life, but his own, contemplating what it means to be a white Southerner in the 21st century. Now, as statues commemorating the Civil War are toppled and Confederate flags come down, Cleary walks the famous battlefields, following in the footsteps of his subject as he questions the legacy of Stonewall Jackson and the South's Lost Cause at a time when the contentions of politics, civil rights, and social justice are at a fever pitch. Combining nuanced, authoritative research with deeply personal stories of life in the modern American South, SEARCHING FOR STONEWALL JACKSON is a thrilling, vivid portrait of a soldier, a war, and a country still contending with its past.

Anti-Catholicism has had a long presence in American history. The Civil War in 1861 gave Catholic Americans a chance to prove their patriotism once and for all. Exploring how Catholics sought to use their participation in the war to counteract religious and political nativism in the United States, Excommunicated from the Union reveals that while the war was an alienating experience for many of 200,000 Catholics who served, they still strove to construct a positive memory of their experiences in order to show that their religion was no barrier to their being loyal American citizens.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award "McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read." -Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic "McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation-white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front." -Eric Foner, The Nation "Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry's work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy's 'undoing,' she has in fact accomplished exactly that." -Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic "A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within." -Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people-white women and slaves-and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders' state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the "black codes," would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction. While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. It also struggled to manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern free-labor economy. However, these failures cannot obscure a number of accomplishments with long-term consequences for American life, among them the Civil Rights Act, the election of the first African American representatives to Congress, and the avoidance of renewed civil war. Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the civil rights movement. In this concise history, award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original account of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on the American social fabric.

One hundred and fifty years after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still captures the American imagination, and its reverberations can still be felt throughout America's social and political landscape. Louis P. Masur's The Civil War: A Concise History offers a masterful and eminently readable overview of the war's multiple causes and catastrophic effects. Masur begins by examining the complex origins of the war, focusing on the pulsating tensions over states rights and slavery. The book then proceeds to cover, year by year, the major political, social, and military events, highlighting two important themes: how the war shifted from a limited conflict to restore the Union to an all-out war that would fundamentally transform Southern society, and the process by which the war ultimately became a battle to abolish slavery. Masur explains how the war turned what had been a loose collection of fiercely independent states into a nation, remaking its political, cultural, and social institutions. But he also focuses on the soldiers themselves, both Union and Confederate, whose stories constitute nothing less than America's Iliad. In the final chapter Masur considers the aftermath of the South's surrender at Appomattox and the clash over the policies of reconstruction that continued to divide President and Congress, conservatives and radicals, Southerners and Northerners for years to come. In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley wrote that the war had "wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." From the vantage of the war's sesquicentennial, this concise history of the entire Civil War era offers an invaluable introduction to the dramatic events whose effects are still felt today.

A Brief Moment in the Sun is the first scholarly biography of Francis Lewis Cardozo, one of the most talented and influential African Americans to hold elected office in the South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Born to a formerly enslaved African American mother and white Jewish father in antebellum South Carolina, Cardozo led a life of extraordinary achievement as a pioneering educator, politician, and government official. However, today he is largely unknown in South Carolina and among students of nineteenth-century American history. Immediately after the Civil War, Cardozo succeeded in creating and leading a successful school for formerly enslaved children in the face of widespread racial hostility. Between 1868 and 1877, voters elected him secretary of state and state treasurer. In the Republican administrations that controlled the state during Reconstruction, Cardozo was a famously honest officeholder when many of his colleagues were notoriously corrupt. He played a major part in securing a viable educational system for Black and white children and land reform for thousands of landless families. Cardozo proved that Black men could govern at least as well as white. As a result, he became the target of white supremacist Democratic politicians after they reclaimed power through a campaign of violence and intimidation. They prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned Cardozo on a fabricated fraud charge. Pardoned in 1879, Cardozo moved to Washington DC, where he led an even more successful school for African American children. Neil Kinghan's Brief Moment in the Sun is the first complete historical analysis of Francis Cardozo and his contribution to Reconstruction and African American history. It draws on original research on Cardozo's early life and education in Scotland and England and pulls together for the first time the extant sources on his experiences in South Carolina and Washington, DC. Kinghan reveals all that Cardozo achieved as a Black educator and political leader and explores what else he might have realized if white racism and violence had not ended his efforts in South Carolina. Above all, Kinghan shows that Francis Cardozo deserves a place of honor and distinction in the history of nineteenth-century America.

What caused the Civil War? Perhaps no question in American history has attracted more interest or sparked more debate. A House Divided presents a fresh and balanced interpretation that challenges the view of slavery as a largely artificial or symbolic issue in the conflict between two incompatible societies. While recognizing the impact of other political disputes and of such concerns as temperance and nativism, Richard Sewell refocuses attention on slavery as the root of sectionalism and, ultimately, the war. A House Divided traces the growth of bitter cetional discord in the years after 1848, when the acquisition of new American territories rekindled old controversies over the expansion of slavery. A series of compromises forestalled the crisis of secession but increasingly divided the country along slavery's lines. Attitudes toward slavery also influenced the conduct and consequences of the war that followed. The union army rapidly accepted the enlistment of emancipated slaves, while the Confederacy faced both subtle subversion from its black labor firce and sagging morale from the alveless Southern whites who felt disproportionately burdened by the war effort. Sewell's rich account of the war covers both military and home fronts and traces the birth of plans to reconstruct the Union and deal with the legacy of slavery.

While most of the fighting took place in the South, the Civil War profoundly affected the North. As farm boys became soldiers and marched off to battle, social, economic, and political changes transformed northern society. In the generations following the conflict, historians tried to understand and explain the North's Civil War experience. Many historical explanations became taken for granted, such as that the Union Army was ideologically Republican, northern Democrats were disloyal, and German Americans were lousy soldiers. Now in this eye-opening collection of eleven stimulating essays, new and important information is unearthed that solidly challenges the old historical arguments. The essays in This Distracted and Anarchical People range widely throughout the history of the Civil War North, using new methods and sources to reexamine old theories and discover new aspects of the nation's greatest conflict. Many of these issues are just as important today as they were a century and a half ago. What were the extent and limits of wartime dissent in the North? How could a president most effectively present himself to the public? Can the savagery of war ever be tamed? How did African Americans create and maintain their families? This Distracted and Anarchical People highlights the newest scholarship on a diverse array of topics, bringing fresh insight to bear on some of the most important topics in history today-such as the democratic press in the antebellum North, peace movements, the Union Army and the elections of 1864, Liberia and the U.S. Civil War, and African American veterans and marriage practices after Emancipation.

For years the Ewing family of Ohio has been lost in the historical shadow cast by their in-law, General William T. Sherman. In the era of the Civil War, it was the Ewing family who raised Sherman, got him into West Point, and provided him with the financial resources and political connections to succeed in war. The patriarch, Thomas Ewing, counseled presidents and clashed with radical abolitionists and southern secessionists leading to the Civil War. Three Ewing sons became Union generals, served with distinction at Antietam and Vicksburg, marched through Georgia, and fought guerrillas in Missouri. The Ewing family stood at the center of the Northern debate over emancipation, fought for the soul of the Republican Party, and waged total war against the South. In Civil War Dynasty, Kenneth J. Heineman brings to life this drama of political intrigue and military valor-warts and all. This work is a military, political, religious, and family history, told against the backdrop of disunion, war, violence, and grief.

Lincoln and Leadership offers fresh perspectives on the 16th president-making novel contributions to the scholarship of one of the more studied figures of American history. The book explores Lincoln's leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian. Taken together, the essays suggest the interplay of military, political, and religious factors informing Lincoln's thought and action and guiding the dynamics of his leadership. The contributors, all respected scholars of the Civil War era, focus on several critical moments in Lincoln's presidency to understand the ways Lincoln understood and dealt with such issues and concerns as emancipation, military strategy, relations with his generals, the use of black troops, party politics and his own re-election, the morality of the war, the place of America in God's design, and the meaning and obligations of sustaining the Union. Overall, they argue that Lincoln was simultaneously consistent regarding his commitments to freedom, democratic government, and Union but flexible, and sometimes contradictory, in the means to preserve and extend them. They further point to the ways that Lincoln's decision making defined the presidency and recast understandings of American "exceptionalism." They emphasize that the "real" Lincoln was an unabashed party man and shrewd politician, a self-taught commander-in-chief, and a deeply religious man who was self-confident in his ability to judge men and to persuade them with words but unsure of what God demanded from America for its collective sins of slavery. Randall Miller's Introduction in particular provides essential weight to the notion that Lincoln's presidential leadership must be seen as a series of interlocking stories. In the end, the contributors collectively remind readers that the Lincoln enshrined as the "Great Emancipator" and "savior of the Union" was in life and practice a work-in-progress. And they insist that "getting right with Lincoln" requires seeing the intersections of his-and America's-military, political, and religious interests and identities.

Through a mixture of: history, story and paranormal investigation, this book is a quest to give names and faces to the shadows and apparitions left over from a tormented time in United States history. A time when the nation was torn in two, families and friends fought each other. Back when we were a nation divided; a country that has yet to heal. From Gettysburg to Antietam to Manassas and further South, we will travel to find those that still haunt the once blood soaked battlefields and homes.

On April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln gave his final speech to thousands gathered in the rain outside the executive mansion in Washington, D.C. Coming two days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and a week after the fall of Richmond, the crowd expected a victory oration. Instead, they heard the President's ideas about how best to proceed in returning the seceded states to "proper practical relation " with the national government and how to advance the status of freedmen in a nation soon to be without slavery. After Lincoln's endorsement of limited black suffrage, one listener had heard enough. Walking away, John Wilkes Booth remarked, "That is the last speech he will ever make. " Three days later, he made good on his threat. Significant in part because it was his last, Lincoln's April 11th speech is also particularly important for providing us with the president's final public thoughts on the problem of reconstruction, a process, as he said that night, "fraught with difficulty. " In Lincoln's Last Speech, renowned historian and author Louis P. Masur uses the occasion of this speech to trace the debate over reconstruction policies-which, he shows, began not with war's end, but with the war's beginning. Masur reveals how, from the start of the war, restoring the union was foremost on Lincoln's mind, and between 1861 and 1865 he pressed multiple plans of action. Even as battles raged, and the odds of victory continued to shift, the aftermath of war was never far from the thoughts of northern statesmen. Masur traces the evolution of Lincoln's ideas and the debate over reconstruction during the war, from the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction on December 8, 1863 to the Wade-Davis bill pushed through Congress by radical Republicans in July 2 1864, and Lincoln's resulting pocket veto. In addition to political reconstruction, Masur examines the questions around social reconstruction, the plight of the freedmen and the debate over the place of blacks in American society. And he considers the implications of Lincoln's speech after April 1865, when Andrew Johnson assumed office and the battles over reconstruction ensued. Filling an important gap in the Lincoln literature, Lincoln's Last Speech illuminates the disputed question of reconstruction, from the earliest days of the Civil War up through the president's final address, and allows us to retrace the path that brought him and the nation to reunion.

The Civil War was undeniably an integral event in American history, but for African Americans, whose personal liberties were dependent upon its outcome, it was an especially critical juncture. The Union defeat of the Confederacy brought African Americans a simultaneous victory over their captors, freeing them from slavery and domination and establishing them as masters of their own fate. But African Americans were far from passive victims of the war. Black soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict Union and Confederate. In Climbing Up to Glory: A Short History of African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilbert L. Jenkins explores this defining period in a story that documents the journey of average African Americans as they struggled to reinvent their lives following the abolition of slavery. In this highly readable book, Jenkins examines the unflagging determination and inner strength of African Americans as they sought to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families by establishing their own businesses and banks and strove to own their own land. He portrays the racial violence and other obstacles blacks endured as they pooled meager resources to institute and maintain their own schools and attempted to participate in the political process. The family unit was also impacted by these profound societal changes. During this tumultuous time, African Americans struggled to rebuild families torn apart by slavery and to legalize family relationships such as slave marriages that were previously deemed unlawful. Compelling and informative, Climbing Up to Glory is an unforgettable tribute to a glowing period in African-American history sure to enrich and inspire American and African-American history enthusiasts.

Several ethnic groups have come to Michigan from the British Isles. Each group of immigrants from this region - the Cornish, English, Irish, and Welsh - has played a significant role in American history. Historic records show that some early nineteenth-century Cornish immigrants were farmers and settled in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. However, the majority of early Cornish immigrants were miners, and much of their influence was felt in the Upper Peninsula of the state. Many of the underground miners from Cornwall got their start in this region before they migrated to other mining regions throughout the United States. Hard-working families came from throughout the peninsula of Cornwall, bringing their history, recipes, songs, religions, and other traditions to Michigan's northern mining country. This nineteenth-century migration brought them to new homes in Keweenaw County, Houghton County, Copper Harbor, Eagle Harbor, and Presque Isle. In the 1830s, newly arrived immigrants also settled in the lower parts of Michigan, in Macomb, Washtenaw, Lenawee, and Oakland counties. The automobile boom of the 1920s sent many of these immigrants and their children to Metro Detroit from the Upper Peninsula, where their traditions are perpetuated today.

A War of Words analyzes Jefferson Davis's public discourse, arguing that throughout his time as president of the Confederacy, Davis settled for short-term rhetorical successes at the expense of creating more substantive and meaningful messages for himself and his constituents. Numerous biographies of Jefferson Davis have been penned; however, until now, there had been no substantive analysis of his public discourse as president of the Confederacy. R. Jarrod Atchison's A War of Words uses concepts from rhetorical theory and public address to help answer a question that has intrigued scholars from a variety of disciplines since the collapse of the Confederacy: what role, if any, did Davis play in the collapse of Confederate nationalism? Most discussions of Davis and nationalism focus on the military outcomes of his controversial wartime decisions. A War of Words focuses less on military outcomes and argues instead that, in the context of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis's rhetorical leadership should have been responsible for articulating a vision for the nation-including the core tenets of its identity, the values the nation should hold dear, the principles it should never compromise, and the goals it should set for its future. Undoubtedly, Davis possessed the skills necessary to make a persuasive public argument. It is precisely because Davis's oratory skills were so powerful that there is room to judge how he used them. In short, being a great orator is not synonymous with successful rhetorical leadership. Atchison posits that Davis's initial successes constrained his rhetorical options later in the war. A War of Words concludes that, in the end, Davis's rhetorical leadership was a failure because he was unable to articulate a coherent Confederate identity in light of the sacrifices endured by the populace in order to sustain the war effort.

The Texans from Hood's Texas Brigade and other regiments who fought at Antietam on 16-17 September 1862 described their experiences of the battle in personal diaries, interviews, newspaper articles, letters, and speeches. Their reminiscences provide a fascinating and harrowing account of the battle as they fought the Army of the Potomac. This book collates their writings alongside speeches that were given in the decades after the battle, during the annual reunions of Hood's Brigade Association and the dedication of the Hood's Brigade Monument at the state capital in Austin, Texas. These accounts describe their actions at the East Woods, Dunker's Church and Miller's Cornfield, and other areas during the battle. For the first time ever, their experiences are compiled in Texans at Antietam: A Terrible Clash of Arms, 16-17 September 1862.

Fair Oaks, the Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, Petersburg the list of significant battles fought by the Second Corps, Army of the Potomac, is a long and distinguished one. This absorbing history of the Second Corps follows the unit's creation and rise to prominence, the battles that earned it a reputation for hard fighting, and the legacy its veterans sought to maintain in the years after the Civil War. More than an account of battles, Defeating Lee gets to the heart of what motivated these men, why they fought so hard, and how they sustained a spirited defense of cause and country long after the guns had fallen silent."

Often called Lee's 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 "Stonewall" Jackson and became the scapegoat for the Northern defeat, blamed by many on the "flight" of German immigrant troops. The impact on America's large German community was devastating. But there is much more to the story than that. Drawing for the first time on German-language newspapers, soldiers' 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 soldiers' 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 reactions-and 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 and assimilation in American life.

Despite a wealth of books on the campaigns of the American Civil War, the subject of combined or joint operations has been largely neglected. This revealing book offers ten case studies of combined Army-Navy operations by Union forces. Presented in chronological order, each essay illuminates an aspect of combined operations during a time of changing technology and doctrine. The essays cover the war along the "rebel coast," including the operations in the North Carolina Sounds in 1861, the Union thrusts up the York and James rivers during the Peninsular Campaign in 1862 and 1864, and the various Union efforts to seize rebel seaports from the Texas coast to Charleston and Wilmington in 1863-65. Concluding the volume are two essays that evaluate the impact of Union combined operations on subsequent doctrine in both the United States and England.

In this provocative new work, Heather Cox Richardson argues that while the North won the Civil War, ending slavery, oligarchy, and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," the victory was short-lived. Settlers from the East pushed into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The Old South found a new home in the West. Both depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise to a white ruling elite, one that thrived despite the abolition of slavery, the assurances provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by Western expansion. How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and white domination that were woven into the nation's fabric from the beginning. Who was the archetypal "new American"? At the nation's founding it was Eastern "yeoman farmer," independent and freedom-loving, who had galvanized and symbolized the Revolution. After the Civil War the mantle was taken up by the cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land and his women against "savages," and protecting his country from its own government. As new states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century, western and southern leaders found common ground. Resources, including massive amounts of federal money, and migrants continued to stream into the West during the New Deal and World War II. "Movement Conservatives"-starting with Barry Goldwater-claimed to embody cowboy individualism, working with Dixiecrats to renew the ideology of the Confederacy. The "Southern strategy" worked. The essence of the Old South never died and the fight for equality endures.

When America went to war with itself, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city. From the imposing grandeur of the Bellamy Mansion that overlooked a busy harbor, to the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, which at the time boasted the longest rail line in the world, the port city was a bustling example of Southern industry. But when conflict came, the city became a pivotal player in the Confederate government's war efforts. Paddy's Hollow boasted more than thirty saloons, while murders happened with alarming frequency. Prostitutes offered their services to the thousands of soldiers passing through town, while civilian and military authorities tried to keep a lid on it all. Local police were woefully inadequate to keep the peace against rioting troops who had witnessed the horrors of places like Chickamauga and Gettysburg. Doctors performed heroically to save lives, fighting disease, battlefield disfigurements, and death with too little of every kind of medicine and supplies. Civilians, railroads, and military officials all competed for too few resources, while offshore the Union blockade of what became the last open port of the Confederacy grew tighter with each passing day. Robert J. Cooke's ten years of research has resulted in a picture of Wilmington that more closely resembles the Wild West's Dodge City than it does some genteel antebellum city.

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.

Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's shocking expose of convent life, had already sold more than 20,000 copies. The book detailed gothic-style horror stories of licentious priests and abusive mothers superior, tortured nuns and novices, and infanticide. By the time the book was revealed to be a fiction and the author, Maria Monk, an impostor, it had already become one of the nineteenth century's best-selling books. In antebellum America only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, outsold it. The success of Monk's book was no fluke, but rather a part of a larger phenomenon of anti-Catholic propaganda, riots, and nativist politics. The secrecy of convents stood as an oblique justification for suspicion of Catholics and the campaign against them, which was intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and, in particular, the role of women in the Republic. At a time when the term "female virtue" pervaded popular rhetoric, the image of the veiled nun represented a threat to the established American ideal of womanhood. Unable to marry, she was instead a captive of a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a white slave, and a foolish virgin. In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers-male and female-forged this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns, and women more broadly, in America.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all. In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalise segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day. The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation's singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

Wright Stephen Batchelor was a farmer from eastern North Carolina who had never left Nash County. However, much like his state, Batchelor's life was upended by the Civil War. He served in both armies, survived Gettysburg, was captured twice, escaped, went to prison, deserted, walked halfway across the country, and, after everything, was the victim of a bizarre murder. Author Michael K. Brantley delves into this common man's Civil War story, detailing his harrowing experiences and, along the way, describing a South in the aftermath of war. Like many North Carolinians, Batchelor was a reluctant Confederate and joined the army only when it appeared inevitable he would be called to serve. He emerged from a POW camp unscathed, after escaping capture. Weeks later, he wasn't so lucky. He was captured again at the Battle of Bristoe Station and found himself at one of the worst Union POW camps of the Civil War, Point Lookout Prison in Maryland. Going with his best bet for survival, he took the Oath of Allegiance and joined the Union Army. Batchelor deserted at his first chance and walked hundreds of miles to rejoin his comrades at Petersburg, just in time for the Union siege. Again he survived combat, and he walked hundreds more miles home to Nash County. After the war he farmed, ran the Nash County Poor House, and dabbled in local politics. One night, after repeated raids on the Poor House chicken coop, Batchelor caught the canine culprit red-handed and dispatched him with his rifle. A few days later, Batchelor was leaving the Nashville courthouse when a teenage boy - the dog's owner - approached him, pulled out a pistol, and shot him down in the middle of the street.