"This excellent collection offers a host of new insights into the impact of the Civil War on civilian life. The essays on subjects ranging from race relations to family life, changes in the role of women, and the war in popular memory, make clear that some of the war's most profound consequences for American history took place away from the battlefield."--Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University

"[This is] an outstanding and very original collection of fifteen essays about the Civil War, including the latest and best scholarship on the North, South, and border states, soldiers and civilians, men and women. Readable and thought provoking, this is a book all students of the Civil War should have in their libraries."--Jean H. Baker, author of "The Stevensons of Illinois"

"Joan Cashin has assembled a stellar cast of historians to probe different aspects of civilian life during and after the Civil War. The happy result is a collection of essays that brims with innovative questions, new information, and fresh insights."--Michael F. Holt, Corcoran Department of History, Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History, University of Virginia

"This collection's great strength is that it addresses a subject that has been inexplicably understudied: the impact of war on civilians. The contributors are among the leading younger figures in the field, and the essays are grounded in extensive archival research. They show that the Civil War was just as disruptive on the homefront as it was on the battlefield. "--Steven Mintz, University of Houston

"The collection offers an excellent introduction to an enormously complex story, shedding light on how women andmen, black and white, North and South were shaped by--and helped shape--the great sectional bloodletting."--Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor of History, University of Virginia, author of "The Confederate War and Lee and His Army in Confederate History"

This book examines the historiography of nineteenth century slavery from the perspective of the "second slavery." The concept of the second slavery emphasizes the relationship between local histories and world-economic transformations. It breaks with conventional narratives of slavery by emphasizing the expansion of reconfigured slaveries in extensive new zones of commodity production in Brazil, Cuba and the US South as part of world-economic processes of decolonization, industrialization, urbanization, and the creation of mass markets. Thus, slavery was not a moribund institution. Capitalist modernity, liberal ideology, and anti-slavery from above or from below, faced a vigorous foe that operated within the very economic, political, and cultural premises of the changing 19th century world. This perspective offers an original approach to the history of slavery. It has opened up vigorous debates over slavery and anti-slavery, Atlantic history and capitalism. An international group of scholars critically engage older traditions of scholarship on Atlantic history, the economic history of slavery, and the history of slavery in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States from the perspective of the second slavery. Each chapter reinterprets its subject matter in a way that opens out to dialogue between national historiographies and to a reformulation of Atlantic and world-economic history. This collection of essays contributes to the development of a more productive conceptual framework for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the historical relation of slavery and world capitalism during the nineteenth century.

This title remaps slave society. In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. Demonstrating that neighborhoods prevailed across the South, Kaye reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship. This is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves.