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Showing 1 - 9 of 9 matches in All Departments
"Integrates the political, social, military, and economic forces of
the Civil War"
Seeking the key to good living through physical well-being, the American public since at least the 1830s has devoured literature proffering medical advice. Making Sense of Self is an historical analysis of the ideological content of a broad sample of late nineteenth-century popular advice literature concerning the body and the mind. At a time when the middle class was threatened with tumultuous social and economic change, such publications offered blueprints for self-regulation, teaching survival and discipline, and bringing some sense of order and hope for self-improvement.Anita and Michael Fellman analyze this literature as a signpost to the general aspirations, anxieties, debates, and assumptions of late Victorian Americans, who were less optimistic than had been their antebellum forebears about personal and social progress. In particular, the authors interpret the ideas these various advisors offered regarding bodily health, the workings of brain and mind, sexuality, and the will. Although the advice literature as a whole was diverse and even contradictory, the ethic of moderation was often stressed as the method, however limited, to obtain some sense of discipline and control, and the will was frequently asserted as the means to a more dynamic self-expression.The sense of fragility, search for security, and dependence on individual self--governance revealed in this literature remain as persistent elements in the middle-class American character. The significance of this popular ideology lies not in whether it led to specific behavior, but in how it enabled people to interpret themselves and their situation to themselves during a period in which many basic ideological issues appeared more confused than certain. Making Sense of Self offers a close examination of a period analogous to our own times.
In "Lincoln's Generals," Gabor S. Boritt and a team of distinguished historians examine the interaction between Abraham Lincoln and his five key Civil War generals: McClellan, Hooker, Meade, Sherman, and Grant, providing fresh insight into this mixed bag of officers and the president's tireless efforts to work with them. The president's relationship with his generals was never easy. Stephen W. Sears underscores McClellan's perverse obstinacy as Lincoln tried to drive him ahead. Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark E. Neely Jr. sheds new light on the president's relationship with Hooker, arguing that he was wrong to push the general to attack at Chancellorsville. Boritt writes about Lincoln's prickly relationship with the victor of Gettysburg, "old snapping turtle" George Meade. Michael Fellman reveals the political stress between the White House and Sherman, a staunch conservative who did not want blacks in his army but who was crucial to the war effort. And John Y. Simon looks past the legendary camaraderie between Lincoln and Grant to reveal the tensions in their relationship. These authors take us inside the personalities and relationships that shaped the course of the nation's most costly war.
Historical observations of abolition have ranged from perspectives of contempt to acclamation, and now show signs of a major change in interpretation. The literature often has been dominated by hostile appraisals of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist leaders until the 1960s, when historians equated abolitionism may have fluctuated from one period to the next, most of this scholarship shared certain assumptions--that abolitionists provided pivotal factors toward the onset of the Civil War, that their internal disputes were intensely interesting, and that somehow they were emblematic of other generations of radicals in the American experience. Today the scope of antislavery scholarship was widened to examine abolition in light of the social, economic, and political climate of nineteenth-century society and culture. Thus volume of fourteen new and original essays comprises the first survey of current directions in abolitionist writings and represents an advanced perspective in contemporary American historical research. The contributors include such well-known scholars on abolitionism as BertramWyatt-Brown, Leonard Richards, James Brewer Stewart, and William Wiecek. The authors examine various dimensions of abolitionism from its religious context to its international effect, from its attitude toward the northern poor to its impact on feminism, and from wars of words waged with southern intellectuals to the bloodier conflicts begun in Kansas. These essays, rather than expounding a single revisionist attitude, include every major approach to antislavery -- women's history, quantitative history, comparative history, legal history, black history, psychohistory, social history. Antislavery Reconsidered allows both specialists and laymen a chance to survey recent scholastic trends in this area and provides for them the assumptions, methods, and conclusions of the best current literature on antislavery.
In 1861, Francis Moore appeared to be a perfectly ordinary, twenty-three year old man: a carriage maker in the bustling Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois. And there he might well have lived out his life in unadventurous comfort. But then the Civil War burst out, and Moore, along with most of his friends, like young men North and South, rushed to enlist in the army. His cavalry regiment soon set off for what proved to be four years of warfare, plunging him into harrowing experiences of battle that would have been unimaginable back in his small hometown and that uprooted him, body and soul, for the remainder of his life. Enter "The Story of My Campaign," the remarkable Civil War memoir of Captain Francis T. Moore, which historian Thomas Bahde here offers in an original edition to contemporary readers for the first time. Moore began the war as a private in Company L of the Second Illinois Volunteer Cavalry, and was soon promoted to lieutenant and then captain of his company. He spent most of the war fighting guerillas in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He fought at the battle of Belmont, Kentucky, in 1861 and raided Mississippi with General Benjamin Grierson in 1864. He also battled Confederate leaders, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest and Leonidas Polk. His unflinching chronicle of small-scale and irregular warfare, combined with his intimate account of military life, make his memoir as absorbing as it is historically valuable. Moore was also an unusually articulate young man with strong opinions about the war, the preservation of the Union, the institution of slavery, African Americans, the people of the South, and the Confederacy: his wartime observations and his postwar reflections on these themes provide not only a captivating narrative, they also provide readers with an opportunity to examine how the conflict endured in the memory of its veterans and the nation they served. The enormous social upheaval and staggering loss of human life during the Civil War cannot be overstated: the estimated 2 percent of Americans-- or 620,000 people --who died in the conflict would be the equivalent of 6,000,000 people today. "The Story of My Campaign "offers an indelible account of this conflagration from the perspective of one of its survivors. It is evidence of a hard war fought--and the long hard life that followed.
Some men panic in the face of war, others embrace its horrific challenges. But none embraced war as ferociously or with as much cold calculation as William Tecumseh Sherman. It was Sherman who both articulated and practiced the relentless scorched-earth policy that broke the heart of the Confederacy. He succeeded in large measure because, better than any other Union general, he fully grasped the essence of psychological warfare and could enact his own deep-rooted rage with ruthless clarity. This biography is much broader than an analysis of Sherman's wartime genius, however. Michael Fellman illuminates the emotional as well as the intellectual, ideological, and occupational lives of this extraordinary, but at the same time representative, Victorian American. Fellman's boldly argued and gracefully written study merits the attention of anyone interested in its brilliant and volatile subject". -- Gary W. Gallagher in the New York Times Book Review Somehow, the key to the sherman riddle has until now eluded biographers. Now Fellman, whose best-known previous book offered the finest history yet written on Civil War guerrilla fighting in the border state of Missouri, has offered as gripping and original a life story as has yet been produced on Sherman. It is most compelling book. Convincing argued and elegantly written, it takes its place as the definitive modern study of the Civil War's most feared fighter". -- Harold Holzer in the Chicago Tribune. "There appears to be nothing written by or to Sherman that Fellman hasn't read and analyzed, no scrap of existing evidence that he hasn't looked at. He makes a persuasive case and he does it in a fascinating and readable way. The innerSherman that emerges isn't necessarily a man you would invite home for dinner, although he would doubtless be charming and endlessly interesting. Here is a famous and furious man, brilliant, insightful, garrulous, complicated, tightly wound, energetic, aggressive, salty, angry, and racist. Here is a man who is grudge-bearing, yet often kind; insecure, yet positive about what the war was about, how to win it, and how it would end". -- Washington Post Book World. "A penetrating study of the psychological makeup of a brilliant, troubled, and troubling man.... one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures in American history", -- William S. McFeely in the Boston Globe. "A vivid portrait of a fiery personality and a troubled, sometimes dark soul. Lively, compelling, and provocative, it will stir controversy. It speaks with loud assurance where others might tread cautiously. It raises the sort of questions should ask more often". -- Brooks Simpson in the Journal of American History.
Jesse and Frank James were household names long before images of
America's most wanted were televised. For several decades after the
Civil War, they were hunted by hundreds who supposed them to be
involved in every bank and train robbery in the Midwest. Trained as
guerrilla fighters in the border conflict between Kansas and
Missouri, they joined with the Younger brothers in February 1866 to
rob a bank in Liberty, Missouri. That was the beginning of a
criminal confederation that seemed beyond the reach of the law
until the Northfield, Minnesota, raid killed three of them and sent
the James brothers into hiding. But they were the objects of posted
rewards that proved too tempting in Jesse's case: in 1882 he was
shot in the back by Robert Ford of his own gang.
During the Civil War, the state of Missouri witnessed the most widespread, prolonged, and destructive guerrilla fighting in American history. With its horrific combination of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and swift and bloody raids on farms and settlements, the conflict approached total war, engulfing the whole populace and challenging any notion of civility. Michael Fellman's Inside War captures the conflict from "inside," drawing on a wealth of first-hand evidence, including letters, diaries, military reports, court-martial transcripts, depositions, and newspaper accounts. He gives us a clear picture of the ideological, social, and economic forces that divided the people and launched the conflict. Along with depicting how both Confederate and Union officials used the guerrilla fighters and their tactics to their own advantage, Fellman describes how ordinary civilian men and women struggled to survive amidst the random terror perpetuated by both sides; what drove the combatants themselves to commit atrocities and vicious acts of vengeance; and how the legend of Jesse James arose from this brutal episode in the American Civil War.
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