Perhaps the most prominent historian of his time, C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) was always at the center of public controversy, wielding power inside the history profession while exercising influence on the reading public. In this collection of essays, historians examine the writings of the American South's esteemed scholar. Examining Woodward's work from various angles, the "critics" in this volume reveal his contributions as history, as ideas, and as part of an activist scholar's quest to understand and influence the racial and social dynamics of his region and times.

Contributors: Edward L. Ayers, M. E. Bradford, Carl N. Degler, Gaines M. Foster, Paul M. Gaston, F. Sheldon Hackney, August Meier, James Tice Moore, Albert Murray, Michael O'Brien, Allan Peskin, David Morris Potter, Howard N. Rabinowitz, John Herbert Roper, Joel R. Williamson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

From the earliest days of the Republic, the United States Army has not just maintained the national defense but has also performed a wide variety of peacetime missions. Army officers helped explore the West, Army engineers built early flood control systems, and Army pilots flew the first airmail routes. The Army Medical Department in particular has long aided the civilian community. Its members regularly contributed to the advancement of medical knowledge and in special situations provided health care for civilians. The Demands of Humanity examines one aspect of that direct assistance, medical aid rendered during natural disasters. Discussing help given both at home and abroad, this third volume in the Special Studies Series examines the origin of the relief mission in the nineteenth century and recounts its history to 1976. With their special expertise in public health and the treatment of mass casualties, Army medical personnel during these years compiled an impressive record of assistance. After the Spanish-American War, Army doctors made medical history in their campaigns against epidemic diseases in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In times of twentieth century floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, famines, and epidemics, Army medical personnel aided individuals and furnished stricken communities valuable advice on sanitation and health care. The Demands of Humanity chronicles the humanitarian contribution made by Army doctors, nurses, and medical corpsmen during disaster situations. It also examines the problems their units encountered in relief operations and explains the development of the Army's assistance role. It thereby contributes not only to the often-neglected history of the peacetime role of the military but to the history of social welfare policy in the United States as well. James L. Collins, Jr. Brigadier General, USA Chief of Military History

Between 1865 and 1920, Congress passed laws to regulate obscenity, sexuality, divorce, gambling, and prizefighting. It forced Mormons to abandon polygamy, attacked interstate prostitution, made narcotics contraband, and stopped the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Gaines Foster explores the force behind this unprecedented federal regulation of personal morality - a combined Christian lobby. Foster analyzes the fears of appetite and avarice that led organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Reform Association to call for moral legislation and examines the efforts and interconnections of the men and women who lobbied for it. His account underscores the crucial role white southerners played in the rise of moral reform after 1890. With emancipation, white southerners no longer needed to protect slavery from federal intervention, and they seized on moral legislation as a tool for controlling African Americans. Enriching our understanding of the aftermath of the Civil War and the expansion of national power, Moral Reconstruction also offers valuable insight into the link between historical and contemporary efforts to legislate morality.

Originally published in 1875, George Cary Eggleston's memoir, which proved immensely popular among readers throughout the country, is a nostalgic, often amusing collection of essays based on the author's Civil War experiences. Eggleston describes life in Virginia before the war, offers glowing assessments of the men who filled the Rebel ranks and the women who stood behind them, satirizes the Confederacy's finances and its army's red tape, and recollects the war's end. He also provides compelling portraits of his heroes, lavishing praise on Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and especially Jeb Stuart. By 1905, A Rebel's Recollections had run through four editions, suggesting how well it reflected the mood of the nation, which by then wanted to forget angry sectionalism and glorify the soldiers of both sides in an idealized view of the war. In this latest edition, Gaines M. Foster provides a new introduction, deftly placing Eggleston's memoir in the context of recent historiography.

After Lee and Grant met at Appomatox Court House in 1865 to sign the document ending the long and bloody Civil War, the South at last had to face defeat as the dream of a Confederate nation melted into the Lost Cause. Through an examination of memoirs, personal papers, and postwar Confederate rituals such as memorial day observances, monument unveilings, and veterans' reunions, Ghosts of the Confederacy probes into how white southerners adjusted to and interpreted their defeat and explores the cultural implications of a central event in American history. Foster argues that, contrary to southern folklore, southerners actually accepted their loss, rapidly embraced both reunion and a New South, and helped to foster sectional reconciliation and an emerging social order. He traces southerners' fascination with the Lost Cause--showing that it was rooted as much in social tensions resulting from rapid change as it was in the legacy of defeat--and demonstrates that the public celebration of the war helped to make the South a deferential and conservative society. Although the ghosts of the Confederacy still haunted the New South, Foster concludes that they did little to shape behavior in it--white southerners, in celebrating the war, ultimately trivialized its memory, reduced its cultural power, and failed to derive any special wisdom from defeat.