Militant? Uncompromising? Pragmatic? Utilitarian? Accommodating? Conservative? To engage Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) is to wrestle with almost all the complexities and paradoxes of nineteenth-century black leadership in one public intellectual. After his previous book on Delany, senior historian Tunde Adeleke has compiled here letters, speeches, contemporary nineteenth-century newspaper articles, and reports written by and about Delany. These vital primary sources cover his Civil War and Reconstruction career in South Carolina and include key critical reactions to Delany's ideas and writings from his contemporaries. There are over ninety documents, the vast majority not previously published. Delany remains the Subject of conflicting and confusing interpretations. Adeleke indicates that Delany actually manifested complex dispositions. He presaged manifestations of the strands of both protest and compromise that would define the early twentieth-century world of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. An African American abolitionist and journalist, Delany advocated for black nationalism, one of the first to do so. After working alongside Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star in the 1840s, Delany looked into establishing a Settlement in West Africa. Yet during the Civil War, he served as the first African American field grade officer in the Union Army. Then he labored for the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina. Delany even ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor as a Republican and later defected to the Democrats. These documents will prove an indispensable call and response to an unparalleled intellectual life.

Lincoln and the Democrats describes the vexatious behavior of a two-party system in war and points to the sound parts of the American system which proved to be the country's salvation: local civic pride, and quiet nonpartisanship in mobilization and funding for the war, for example. While revealing that the role of a noxious 'white supremacy' in American politics of the period has been exaggerated - as has the power of the Copperheads - Neely revives the claim that the Civil War put the country on the road to 'human rights', and also uncovers a previously unnoticed tendency toward deceptive and impractical grandstanding on the Constitution during war in the United States.

Native Southerners lived in vibrant societies, rich in tradition and cultural sophistication, for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Over the ensuing centuries, Native Southerners adapted to the presence of Europeans, endeavouring to incorporate them into their social, cultural, and economic structures. However, by the end of the American Revolutionary War, Indigenous communities in the American South found themselves fighting for their survival. This collection chronicles those fights, revealing how Native Southerners grappled with colonial legal and political pressure; discussing how Indigenous leaders navigated the politics of forced removal; and showing the enduring strength of Native Americans who evaded removal and remained in the South to rebuild communities during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This book was originally published as a special issue of American Nineteenth Century History.

This book covers the history of the Forty-fifth Illinois Volunteer Infantry—an exceptional regiment in every respect—from its inception, long training period, battle and campaign history, and the soldiers’ post-war lives. Although the Forty-fifth suffered great losses in battle, the unit earned many honors, and generals consistently chose the regiment to lead attacks.

In 1941, the Franco regime established the Spanish Division of Volunteers to take part in the Russian campaign as a unit integrated into the German Wehrmacht. Recruited by both the Fascist Party (Falange) and the Spanish army, around 47,000 Spanish volunteers joined what would become known as the "Blue Division." The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945 explores an intimate history of the Blue Division "from below," using personal war diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as official documents from military archives in Spain, Germany, Britain, and Russia. In addition to describing the Spanish experience on the Eastern Front, Xose M. Nunez Seixas takes on controversial topics including the Blue Division's proximity to the Holocaust and how members of the Blue Division have been remembered and commemorated. Addressing issues such as the behaviour of the Spaniards as occupiers, their perception by the Russians, their witnessing of the Holocaust, their commitment to the war aims of Nazi Germany, and their narratives on the war after 1945, this book illuminates the experience of Spanish combatants and occupied civilians.

Edward Wild, the controversial Union general who headed the all-black African Brigade in the Civil War, was one of the most loved and most hated figures of the 19th century. The man was neither understood nor appreciated by military or civilian, black or white, Northerner or Southerner. After enlisting at the outbreak of the war, Wild was promoted to Brigadier General and placed in charge of the United States Colored Troops. In fulfilling his assignment to free slaves and gain recruits, he took three women as hostages and ordered a great deal of property destruction. He freed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves and settled them safely on Roanoke Island. Wild then not only recruited the newly freed blacks, but trained them and gave them the opportunity to prove their worth in battle. Nobody, it seems, was happy about serving with them, but the African Brigade performed courageously in several battles. Wild did some inexplicable things. Were his actions typical of the 19th century or did he act outside the norm? Was the criticism he suffered from his fellow Union officers valid - or was it due to personality conflicts? Did he deserve to be arrested, court-marshalled, and even wiped from the history books - or was he the victim of discrimination? This work draws its answers from extensive research and includes many rare letters to and from Wild, including one from one of the North Carolinian hostages.

This is a coordinated presentation of the economic basis of revolutionary change in 16th- and early-17th century England, addressing a crucial but neglected phase of historical development. It traces a transformation in the agrarian economy and substantiates the decisive scale on which this took place, showing how the new forms of occupation and practice on the land related to seminal changes in the general dynamics of commercial activity. An integrated, self-regulating national market generated new imperatives, particularly a demand for a right of freedom of trade from arbitrary exactions and restraints. This took political force through the special status that rights of consent had acquired in England, based on the rise of sovereign representative law following the Break with Rome. These associations were reflected in a distinctive merchant-gentry alliance, seeking to establish freedom of trade and representative control of public finance, through parliament. This produced a persistent challenge to royal prerogatives such as impositions from 1610 onwards. Parliamentary provision, especially legislation, came to be seen as essential to good government. These ambitions led to the first revolutionary measures of the Long Parliament in early 1641, establishing automatic parliaments and the normative force of freedom of trade.

First published in 1907, Military Memoirs of a Confederate is regarded by many historians as one of the most important and dispassionate first-hand general accounts of the American Civil War. Unlike some other Confederate memoirists, General Edward Porter Alexander had no use for bitter "Lost Cause" theories to explain the South's defeat. Alexander was willing to objectively evaluate and criticize prominent Confederate officers, including Robert E. Lee. The result is a clear-eyed assessment of the long, bloody conflict that forged a nation. The memoir opens with Alexander, recently graduated from West Point, heading to Utah to tamp down the hostile actions of Mormons who had refused to receive a territorial governor appointed by President Buchanan. A few years later, Alexander finds himself on the opposite side of a much larger rebellion this time aligned with Confederates bent on secession from the Union. In the years that follow, he is involved in most of the major battles of the East, including Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. Alexander describes each battle and battlefield in sharp detail. Few wartime narratives offer the insight and objectivity of Alexander's Military Memoirs of a Confederate . Civil war buffs and students of American history have much to learn from this superb personal narrative. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Capital, Labor, and State is a systematic and thorough examination of American labor policy from the Civil War to the New Deal. David Brian Robertson skillfully demonstrates that although most industrializing nations began to limit employer freedom and regulate labor conditions in the 1900s, the United States continued to allow total employer discretion in decisions concerning hiring, firing, and workplace conditions. Robertson argues that the American constitution made it much more difficult for the American Federation of Labor, government, and business to cooperate for mutual gain as extensively as their counterparts abroad, so that even at the height of New Deal, American labor market policy remained a patchwork of limited protections, uneven laws, and poor enforcement, lacking basic national standards even for child labor.

Avenging Lincoln's Death: The Trial of John Wilkes Booth's Accomplices is an examination of the 1865 military commission trial of eight alleged accomplices of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who murdered President Abraham Lincoln. The book analyzes the trial transcript and other relevant evidence relating to the guilt of Booth's alleged accomplices, as well as a careful application of basic constitutional law principles to the jurisdiction of the military commission and the fundamental fairness of the trial. The author found that the military commission trial was unconstitutional and unfair because Congress never authorized trial by military commission for these eight civilians. President Johnson exceeded the scope of his authority as commander in chief by ordering the accomplices to be tried by military commission. He failed to follow the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863 that required him to turn over the alleged accomplices to civilian authorities for prosecution. The accomplices were convicted on perjured testimony and the Government was allowed to drag in unrelated evidence of Confederate atrocities to poison the minds of the panel of officers.

Charles Dew's Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states' secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields-where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles-and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice. Inverting Robert E. Lee's famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman's comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined. Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865 "This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."- Civil War History "Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."- Journal of American History Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II "Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."- Reviews in American History "Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."- Journal of Military History

The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and his two most influential ancestors, his mother and "the Virginia planter," a slaveholder, a shadowy grandfather he likely never met, is rarely mentioned in Lincoln biographies or in history texts. However, Lincoln, forever linked to the cause of freedom and equality in America, spoke candidly of the planter to his law partner, Billy Herndon, who recalled his words, "My mother inherited his qualities and I hers. All that I am or ever hope to be I get from my mother-God bless her." This vital two-generation relationship was nonetheless problematic. In Lincoln's boyhood the planter was a figure he ridiculed while in his young manhood the planter evolved into a role model whom Lincoln revered and associated with Jefferson's overdue ideal that "all men are created equal." Thus galvanized "by blood" to educate himself, to stand for election and to oppose slavery, Lincoln quit farming at age 22. This book explains how he thus followed an inherited family dream.

This book brings together fourteen of the most influential articles on the English Civil War, which have appeared over the last thirty years, introduced and contextualized for the reader. Peter Gaunt provides a substantial and wide-ranging introduction giving the essential background to the period and key debates within it, and helping readers to understand and interpret the following chapters.

"The English Civil War: The Essential Readings" includes coverage of all the major debates on this key period in English and British history. It examines the different interpretations of the causes of the war, encompassing long-term origins and short-term causes in the British as well as an English context. It covers key themes surrounding the course of the civil war of 1642-46, and aspects of the impact and consequences of the civil war during the late 1640s and beyond. It discusses military and political affairs alongside social, religious and economic developments, providing a rounded picture of the period.

This book not only presents an essential source of key articles, it also provides the critical context to understanding the nature of past and continuing historical debates surrounding the major aspects of the civil war.

Leading historians from around the world have been commissioned to write 42 accessible and definitive guides to every major war throughout history, with an emphasis on the people who fought and the impact on the world at large. Eyewitness accounts are used to give a soldier's-eye view of the conflict and expose the reality of the battlefield. Illustrated with colour photographs and maps throughout, Essential Histories will provide for a deepened understanding of the nature of war and human history.

The war is over, but in this world made for men can she carve her own path? 'A richly detailed historical drama' USA Today 1865. The American Civil War has just ended. When Vita Tenney's father tells her she must abandon her dream of becoming a doctor and get married instead, she looks for a means of escape - and finds one in war veteran Jacob Culhane. Damaged by what he's seen in battle and with all his family gone, Jacob is seeking a new start. Then he meets Vita and together they hatch a plan. But even the best plans have unexpected consequences . . . Sweeping and atmospheric, The Physician's Daughter is a compelling story of ambition, betrayal and love and of two people trying to make their way in a world that is struggling to escape its past. 'Vividly realised, and impeccably researched, with a determined female lead' Kayte Nunn, author of The Botanist's Daughter 'Historical fiction at its best' Tracy Rees, author of The Rose Garden Readers love The Physician's Daughter 'For women who decide not to take "no" as the final answer' 'Exceptionally detailed and atmospheric' 'A page turner . . . I read it in a day' 'A must for all fans of historical drama' 'Phenomenal'

In the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter, outraged Northerners looked forward to a quick and decisive victory over the Confederate rebels. But after the First Battle of Bull Run it became clear to supporters of the Union that the Civil War would be prolonged and deadly. How Northern society mobilized to fight this first great modern war is the subject of J. Matthew Gallman's perceptive history. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date scholarship and addressing the issues from a fresh perspective, his book fills a surprising void in Civil War literature. Gallman's focus is on continuity and change what traditions the North relied on in preparing for war, and what adjustments it made in its behavior and institutions. From his analysis it seems clear that the Civil War was not the great watershed in political, economic, and social development that is often supposed. Gallman's investigation of the status of women and blacks, for example, shows that wartime gains, if significant for a few, were on the whole decidedly modest. And while "total war" came to the battlefield in a frightening manner, its impact on the Northern home front was far less certain. American Ways Series."

Hoping to deter the Union navy from aggressive action on southern waterways during the Civil War, the Confederacy led the way in developing torpedoes, a term that in the nineteenth century referred to contact mines floating on or just below the water's service. With this book, two little-known but important manuscripts related to these valuable weapons become available for the first time. General Gabriel J. Rains, director of the Confederate Torpedo Bureau, penned his Torpedo Book as a manual for the fabrication and use of land mines and offensive and defensive water mines. With 21 scale drawings, Notes Explaining Rebel Torpedoes and Ordnance by Captain Peter S. Michie documents from the Federal perspective the construction and use of these infernal machines. A detailed accounting, by the editor, of the vessels sunk or damaged by Confederate torpedoes and numerous photographs of existing specimens from museums and private collections complete this significant compilation.

The Confederacy had a great opportunity to turn the Civil War in its favor in 1864, but squandered this chance when it failed to finish off a Union army cornered in Louisiana because of concerns about another Union army coming south from Arkansas. The Confederates were so confused that they could not agree on a course of action to contend with both threats, thus the Union offensive advancing from Arkansas saved the one in Louisiana and became known to history as the Camden Expedition. The Camden Expedition is intriguing because of the "might-have-beens" had the key players made different decisions. The author contends that if Frederick Steele, commander of the Federal VII Army Corps, had not received a direct order from General Ulysses S. Grant to move south, disaster would have befallen not only the Army of the Gulf in Louisiana but the entire Union cause, and possibly would have prevented Abraham Lincoln from winning reelection.

This book offers a unique firsthand account of the experiences of a teenage officer in America's Civil War. Second Lieutenant Thomas James Howell was only seventeen years old when he received his commission to serve the 3rd New Jersey Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Featuring sixty-five letters that Howell wrote home to his family, this book describes soldier life in the Army of the Potomac during the spring and summer of 1862, focusing on Howell's experiences during Major General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. Howell's letters tell the story of a young man coming of age in the army. He wrote to his mother and siblings about the particular challenges he faced in seeking to earn the respect of both the men he commanded and his superiors. Unfortunately, however, the young lieutenant's life was cut short in his very first combat experience when he was struck in the abdomen by a cannonball and nearly torn in two during the Battle of Gaines' Mill. This book records Howell's tragic story, and it traces his distinctive perception of the Civil War as a vehicle enabling him to transition into manhood and to prove his masculinity.

"The best regiment of either army, North or South"--this was the description of Cobb's Legion offered by Confederate General Wade Hampton during the Civil War. This large and experienced unit played a crucial role for the South throughout the war. Their actions in more than 130 battles and other engagements over the course of the war are the subject of this book. Additionally, biographies of the officers and the nearly 1500 men of the regiment are included, as well as records of those who died, deserted, or were prisoners of war.

Thomas J. Wood, Kentuckian, graduated fifth in his West Point class in 1846 and joined the staff of General Zachary Taylor. The Mexican War was just beginning and Wood fought in several battles after which he served under General Winfield Scott in Mexico City. In 1861, Wood became a brigadier general of volunteers and began his Civil War service with the Army of the Cumberland, with whom he fought in every campaign and most of its major battles. Wood has never before been the subject of a full length biography but is well known for a notorious lapse of judgment resulting in a Confederate breakthrough at Chickamauga that shattered the Union right flank and threatened the survival of the Army of the Cumberland. It is a moment in the war still argued about. Wood learned from his mistake, became a better general from that time on (notably at Missionary Ridge and Nashville), and redeemed himself in the eyes of his fellow officers and his civilian superiors.

Previous histories of the press in the American Civil War have focused on how journalists covered military operations. Taking a cultural approach, this book is unique in its focus on the press as a social, political, and economic institution that both shaped and was shaped by the Confederacy's experience in the Civil War. It expertly documents how the press changed, how it stayed the same, and how it evolved by examining the role of the press in Confederate society, social and demographic characteristics of journalists and their audiences, legal regulation of the industry, and how the war influenced the business side of journalism as well as the editorial. The story of the Confederate press provides a prime opportunity to study how a domestic war affects the American press. By examining the actors as well as the roles, it is possible to draw a more complete picture of the place of the press in the Confederacy and how the war influenced Southern newspapers.

The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of anti-slavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes's brilliant history of Lincoln's anti-slavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of anti-slavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States. Lincoln adopted the anti-slavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his anti-slavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action-in the western territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade-they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He re-entered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas/Nebraska Act. He attempted to persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition with compensation for slaveholders and the colonisation of free Blacks abroad. President Lincoln took full advantage of the anti-slavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King's cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.