The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States. Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-United States border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, they had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had created an expansive international border that restricted movement. The vision that seemed so clear in the minds of diplomats and politicians was never so well-defined on the ground. As A Line of Blood and Dirt argues, both countries built their border across Indigenous lands using hunger, violence, and coercion to displace existing communities and to disrupt their ideas of territory and belonging. Drawing on oral histories, map visualizations, and archival sources, Benjamin Hoy reveals the role Indigenous people played in the development of the international boundary, as well as the impact the border had on Indigenous people, European settlers, Chinese migrants, and African Americans. Unable to prevent movement at the border's physical location for over a century, Canada and the United States instead found ways to project fear across international lines. Bringing together the histories of tribes, immigration, economics, and the relationship of neighboring nations, A Line of Blood and Dirt offers a new history of Indigenous peoples and the borderland.

When Abraham Lincoln expressed gratitude for the northern churches in the spring of 1864, it had nothing to do with his appreciation of doctrine, liturgy, or Christian fellowship. As a collective whole, the church earned the president's admiration because of its rabid patriotism and support for the war. Ministers publicly proclaimed the righteousness of the Union, condemned slavery, and asserted that God favored the Federal army. Yet all of this would have amounted to nothing more than empty bravado without the support of the men and women sitting in the pews. This creative book examines the Civil War from the perspective of the northern laity, those religious civilians whose personal faith influenced their views on politics and slavery, helped them cope with physical separation and death engendered by the war, and ultimately enabled them to discern the hand of God in the struggle to preserve the national Union. From Lincoln's election to his assassination, the book weaves together political, military, social, and intellectual history into a religious narrative of the Civil War on the northern home front. Packed with compelling human interest stories, this account draws on letters, diaries, and church records from 165 manuscript collections housed at 30 different archives and libraries, letters and editorials from 40 different newspapers, and scores of published primary sources. It conclusively demonstrates that many devout civilians regarded the Civil War as a contest imbued with religious meaning. But in the process of giving their loyal support to the government as individual citizens, religious Northerners politicized the church as a collective institution and used it to uphold the Union so the purified nation could promote Christianity around the world. Christian patriotism helped win the war, but the politicization of religion did not lead to the redemption of the state.

Jarret Ruminski examines ordinary lives in Confederate-controlled Mississippi to show how military occupation and the ravages of war tested the meaning of loyalty during America's greatest rift. The extent of southern loyalty to the Confederate States of America has remained a subject of historical contention that has resulted in two conflicting conclusions: one, southern patriotism was either strong enough to carry the Confederacy to the brink of victory, or two, it was so weak that the Confederacy was doomed to crumble from internal discord. Mississippi, the home state of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, should have been a hotbed of Confederate patriotism. The reality was much more complicated. Ruminski breaks the weak/strong loyalty impasse by looking at how people from different backgrounds - women and men, white and black, enslaved and free, rich and poor - negotiated the shifting contours of loyalty in a state where Union occupation turned everyday activities into potential tests of patriotism. While the Confederate government demanded total national loyalty from its citizenry, this study focuses on wartime activities such as swearing the Union oath, illegally trading with the Union army, and deserting from the Confederate army to show how Mississippians acted on multiple loyalties to self, family, and nation. Ruminski also probes the relationship between race and loyalty to indicate how an internal war between slaves and slaveholders defined Mississippi's social development well into the twentieth century.

Prison Pens presents the memoir of a captured Confederate soldier in northern Virginia and the letters he exchanged with his fiancee during the Civil War. Wash Nelson and Mollie Scollay's letters, as well as Nelson's own manuscript memoir, provide rare insight into a world of intimacy, despair, loss, and reunion in the Civil War South. The tender voices in the letters combined with Nelson's account of his time as a prisoner of war provide a story that is personal and political, revealing the daily life of those living in the Confederacy and the harsh realities of being an imprisoned soldier. Ultimately, through the juxtaposition of the letters and memoir, Prison Pens provides an opportunity for students and scholars to consider the role of memory and incarceration in retelling the Confederate past and incubating Lost Cause mythology.,br> This book will be accompanied by a digital component: a website that allows students and scholars to interact with the volume's content and sources via an interactive map, digitized letters, and special lesson plans.

The Battle of Ezra Church was one of the deadliest engagements in the Atlanta Campaign of the Civil War and continues to be one of the least understood. Both official and unofficial reports failed to illuminate the true bloodshed of the conflict: one of every three engaged Confederates was killed or wounded, including four generals. Nor do those reports acknowledge the flaws - let alone the ultimate failure - of Confederate commander John Bell Hood's plan to thwart Union general William Tecumseh Sherman's southward advance. In an account that refutes and improves upon all other interpretations of the Battle of Ezra Church, noted battle historian Gary Ecelbarger consults extensive records, reports, and personal accounts to deliver a nuanced hour-by-hour overview of how the battle actually unfolded. His narrative fills in significant facts and facets of the battle that have long gone unexamined, correcting numerous conclusions that historians have reached about key officers' intentions and actions before, during, and after this critical contest. Eleven troop movement maps by leading Civil War cartographer Hal Jespersen complement Ecelbarger's analysis, detailing terrain and battle maneuvers to give the reader an on-the-ground perspective of the conflict. With new revelations based on solid primary-source documentation, Slaughter at the Chapel is the most comprehensive treatment of the Battle of Ezra Church yet written, as powerful in its implications as it is compelling in its moment-to-moment details.

The Texas 26th Cavalry Regiment was formed in March, 1862, using the 7th Texas Cavalry Battalion as its nucleus. Its companies were from Huntsville, Houston, Lockhart, Galveston, Centerville, and Hempstead, and Leon and Walker counties. Consi-dered to be one of the best disciplined regiments in Confederate service, it was assigned to H. Bee's and Debray's Brigade in the Trans-Mississippi Depart-ment. The unit served along the Rio Grande and in January, 1864, contained 29 officers and 571 men. It was involved in the operations against Banks' Red River Campaign, then returned to Texas where it was stationed at Houston and later Navasota. Here the 26th disbanded in May, 1865.