In this concise yet comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and crisply written study, The Improbable Era places developments over the last three decades in Southern economics, politics, education, religion, the arts, and racial revolution into a disciplined framework that brings a measure of order to the perplexing chaos of this era of fundamental change in Southern life.

" An updated edition of this concise yet comprehensive history of the Civil War, written by a distinguished historian of the conflict. Charles Roland skillfully interweaves the story of battles and campaigns with accounts of the major political, diplomatic, social, and cultural events of the epoch and insightful sketches of the leading actors. Of prime interest are the contrasts he draws between the opposing presidents and generals. What traits, he asks, made Lincoln superior to Davis as a war leader? How were Union military leaders able to forge a more effective fighting force, a more comprehensive strategy than their opponents? Roland's thoughtful anwers and his recognition of the contadictions of human nature and the interpaly of intention and chance raise this book above a mere recounting of military events. The story of the Civil War is the epic of the American people. Never has it been told more movingly.

Before his death in 1870, Robert E. Lee penned a letter to Col. Charles Marshall in which he argued that we must cast our eyes backward in times of turmoil and change, concluding that "it is history that teaches us to hope." Charles Pierce Roland, one of the nation's most distinguished and respected historians, has done exactly that, devoting his career to examining the South's tumultuous path in the years preceding and following the Civil War. History Teaches Us to Hope: Reflections on the Civil War and Southern History is an unprecedented compilation of works by the man the volume editor John David Smith calls a "dogged researcher, gifted stylist, and keen interpreter of historical questions."Throughout his career, Roland has published groundbreaking books, including The Confederacy (1960), The Improbable Era: The South since World War II (1976), and An American Iliad: The Story of the Civil War (1991). In addition, he has garnered acclaim for two biographical studies of Civil War leaders: Albert Sidney Johnston (1964), a life of the top field general in the Confederate army, and Reflections on Lee (1995), a revisionist assessment of a great but frequently misunderstood general. The first section of History Teaches Us to Hope, "The Man, The Soldier, The Historian," offers personal reflections by Roland and features his famous "GI Charlie" speech, "A Citizen Soldier Recalls World War II." Civil War--related writings appear in the following two sections, which include Roland's theories on the true causes of the war and four previously unpublished articles on Civil War leadership. The final section brings together Roland's writings on the evolution of southern history and identity, outlining his views on the persistence of a distinct southern culture and his belief in its durability. History Teaches Us to Hope is essential reading for those who desire a complete understanding of the Civil War and southern history. It offers a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary historian.

This early work by the esteemed historian Charles P. Roland draws from an abundance of primary sources to describe how the Civil War brought south Louisiana's sugarcane industry to the brink of extinction, and disaster to the lives of civilians both black and white. A gifted raconteur, Roland sets the scene where the Louisiana cane country formed ""a favoured and colourful part of the Old South,"" and then unfolds the series of events that changed it forever: secession, blockade, invasion, occupation, emancipation, and defeat. Though sugarcane survived, production did not match prewar levels for twenty-five years. Roland's approach is both illustrative of an earlier era and remarkably seminal to current emancipation studies. He displays sympathy for plantation owners' losses, but he considers as well the sufferings of women, slaves, and freedmen, yielding a rich study of the social, cultural, economic, and agricultural facets of Louisiana's sugar plantations during the Civil War.

The Confederacy was never single-minded. From the fateful year of 1861 until Appomattox, the South was a complex of heroism and cowardice, grief and frivolity, nationalism and state rights. But at the same time the Southern nation underwent a complete career from birth through maturity to death.
In" The Confederacy" Charles P. Roland is faithful to both the larger career and the internal complexity. Paying careful attention to President Davis' struggle against dividing forces within, the author skillfully narrates the attempt of the Confederacy to wage total war against superior forces. All the poignant events and conditions are here: the formation of the government, the upper South's final commitment to the cause, the doomed attempts to combat the Northern blockade at home and Northern diplomacy overseas, an agrarian economy's heroic defiance of an industrial enemy, the desperate measures by which the Davis government tried to sustain the Confederacy, and, at last, the dissolution and flight of the administration in 1865.
With accuracy, sensitivity, and balance, Mr. Roland develops the epic themes of his story against a background of vivid historical detail and re-creates the Confederacy with a tragic splendor--the prime quality of its surviving image among Southerners.

The Life of Albert Sidney Johnston, selected by John H. Jenkins III as one of the basic Texas books, reads like a litany of the important events in the life of the Texas Republic and early statehood through the Civil War. A native Kentuckian and 1826 graduate of West Point, and a veteran of the Black Hawk War, Johnston arrived in Texas in 1836 shortly after the battle of San Jacinto and enlisted as a private in the Texas Army. Soon discovered in the ranks, he was immediately appointed the army's adjutant general. His injury from a duel with Felix Huston later prevented his taking command of the army. In 1838 he was appointed Texas' Secretary of War, and later led the expedition against the Cherokee Indians in East Texas. He commanded the 1st Texas Rifle Volunteers dring the Mexican War and became a regular officer in the US Army--one of the few Texas military men permitted to do so. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Johnston was offered a position second in rank only to the aging Winfield Scott, but he refused the Federal government's offer and instead became commander of the Confederacy's Department No. 2, the Western Department. Keenly aware of the military weakness of the South, he issued a call for men at Bowling Green, Kentucky, and formed and drilled his army. On April 6, 1862, Johnston was killed at the battle of Shiloh. The author, Johnston's son, presents "a whole picture of the character of a difficult, generally taciturn man, and defends his actions in a balanced, scholarly manner." The son, having access to all of his father's private correspondence and papers, including his complete Confederate archives, was able to provide anecdotes only a son could know, and was able to persuade many of his father's associates to submit memoirs about him. Never before reprinted since its last publication in 1878, this new volume is of inestimable value and interest to historians and to other readers of Civil War history and early Texas history. This edition contains a new introduction by Charles P. Roland, author of Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics, and Jefferson Davis's Greatest General: Albert Sidney Johnston (McWhiney Foundation Press, 2000).

" With a new foreword by Gary W. Gallagher Selected as one of the best one hundred books ever written on the Civil War by Civil War Times Illustrated and by Civil War: The Magazine of the Civil War Society A new, revised edition of the only full-scale biography of the Confederacy's top-ranking field general during the opening campaigns of the Civil War.