Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works serves as a wide-ranging analysis of texts written by individuals who experienced the American Civil War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Stephen Cushman, this volume, like its companion, Civil War Writing: New Perspectives on Iconic Texts (2019), features the voices of authors who felt compelled to convey their stories for a variety of reasons. Some produced works intended primarily for their peers, while others were concerned with how future generations would judge their wartime actions. One diarist penned her entries with no thought that they would later become available to the public. The essayists explore the work of five men and three women, including prominent Union and Confederate generals, the wives of a headline-seeking US cavalry commander and a Democratic judge from New York City, a member of Robert E. Lee's staff, a Union artillerist, a matron from Richmond's sprawling Chimborazo Hospital, and a leading abolitionist US senator. Civil War Witnesses and Their Books shows how some of those who lived through the conflict attempted to assess its importance and frame it for later generations. Their voices have particular resonance today and underscore how rival memory traditions stir passion and controversy, providing essential testimony for anyone seeking to understand the nation's greatest trial and its aftermath.

The American South received increased attention from national commentators during the interwar era. Beginning in the 1920s, the proliferation of daily book columns and Sunday book supplements in newspapers reflected a growing audience of educated readers and its demand for books and book reviews. This period of intensified scrutiny coincided with a boom in the publishing industry, which, in turn, encouraged newspapers to pay greater attention to the world of books. Reviewing the South shows how northern critics were as much involved in the Southern Literary Renaissance as Southern authors and critics. Southern writing, Gardner argues, served as a litmus to gauge Southern exceptionalism. For critics and their readers, nothing less than the region's ability to contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the nation was at stake.

This collection of essays emerged from a symposium held at Mercer University which examined the ways in which W. E. B. DuBois's theories of race have shaped racial discussion and public policy in the twentieth-century. The essays also examine the application of Du Bois's theories to the new millennium, as well as his contributions to the study of the humanities.

Vintage-looking, dream-like textures can open up a whole new world in your photography. However, there is much, much more to working with textures than simply merging them with an image via Photoshop. In this gorgeous new guide from texture guru Sarah Gardner, you'll learn everything there is to know about how to maximize the potential of these exciting tools. In addition to hundreds of beautiful example images, this book is also packed with practical advice on what makes a good texture, and how and when to use them. How an image is initially captured and processed has a significant impact on the effect a texture will have, so you'll also learn what to consider when composing and shooting (rather than simply relying on post-processing) and how to use lighting and background considerations effectively for later work with textures. Workshop notes and a supplemental website will help you put Sarah's techniques into practice immediately. Beautiful enough to sit on your coffee table yet practical enough to store near your computer, this book will show you everything you need to know to get that coveted vintage-feel in your images, whether you're a casual family snapper or a seasoned professional.

Vintage-looking, dream-like textures can open up a whole new world in your photography. However, there is much, much more to working with textures than simply merging them with an image via Photoshop. In this gorgeous new guide from texture guru Sarah Gardner, you'll learn everything there is to know about how to maximize the potential of these exciting tools. In addition to hundreds of beautiful example images, this book is also packed with practical advice on what makes a good texture, and how and when to use them. How an image is initially captured and processed has a significant impact on the effect a texture will have, so you'll also learn what to consider when composing and shooting (rather than simply relying on post-processing) and how to use lighting and background considerations effectively for later work with textures. Workshop notes and a supplemental website will help you put Sarah's techniques into practice immediately. Beautiful enough to sit on your coffee table yet practical enough to store near your computer, this book will show you everything you need to know to get that coveted vintage-feel in your images, whether you're a casual family snapper or a seasoned professional.

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child's hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

With a fresh interpretation of African American resistance to kidnapping and pre-Civil War political culture, Blind No More sheds new light on the coming of the Civil War by focusing on a neglected truism: the antebellum free states experienced a dramatic ideological shift that questioned the value of the Union. Jonathan Daniel Wells explores the cause of disunion as the persistent determination on the part of enslaved people that they would flee bondage no matter the risks. By protesting against kidnappings and fugitive slave renditions, they brought slavery to the doorstep of the free states, forcing those states to recognize the meaning of freedom and the meaning of states' rights in the face of a federal government equally determined to keep standing its divided house. Through these actions, African Americans helped northerners and westerners question whether the constitutional compact was still worth upholding, a reevaluation of the republican experiment that would ultimately lead not just to Civil War but to the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery. Wells contends that the real story of American freedom lay not with the Confederate rebels nor even with the Union army but instead rests with the tens of thousands of self-emancipated men and women who demonstrated to the Founders, and to succeeding generations of Americans, the value of liberty.

A sweeping historiographical collection, Reinterpreting Southern Histories updates and expands upon the iconic volumes Writing Southern History and Interpreting Southern History, both published by Louisiana State University Press. With nineteen original essays cowritten by some of the most prominent historians working in southern history today, this volume boldly explores the current state, methods, innovations, and prospects of the richly diverse and transforming field of southern history. Two scholars at different stages of their careers coauthor each essay, working collaboratively to provide broad knowledge of the most recent historiography and an expansive vision for historiographical contexts. This innovative approach provides an intellectual connection with the earlier volumes while reflecting cutting-edge scholarship in the field. Underlying each essay is the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s, which introduced the use of language and cultural symbols and the influence of gender studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies. The essays also rely less on framing the South as a distinct region and more on contextualizing it within national and global conversations. Reinterpreting Southern Histories, like the two classic volumes that preceded it, serves as both a comprehensive analysis of the current historiography of the South and a reinterpretation of that history, reaching new conclusions for enduring questions and establishing the parameters of future debates.