Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was one of the most influential jurists of his time. From the antebellum era and the Civil War through the First World War and into the New Deal years, Holmes' long life and career as a Supreme Court Justice spanned an eventful period of American history, as the country went from an agrarian republic to an industrialized world power. In this concise, engaging book, Susan-Mary Grant puts Holmes' life in national context, exploring how he both shaped and reflected his changing country. She examines the impact of the Civil War on his life and his thinking, his role in key cases ranging from the issue of free speech in Schenck v. United States to the infamous ruling in favor of eugenics in Buck v. Bell, showing how behind Holmes' reputation as a liberal justice lay a more complex approach to law that did not neatly align with political divisions. Including a selection of key primary documents, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. introduces students of U.S., Civil War, and legal history to a game-changing figure and his times.

Themes of the American Civil War offers a timely and useful guide to this vast topic for a new generation of students. The volume provides a broad-ranging assessment of the causes, complexities, and consequences of America s most destructive conflict to date. The essays, written by top scholars in the field, and reworked for this new edition, explore how, and in what ways, differing interpretations of the war have arisen, and explains clearly why the American Civil War remains a subject of enduring interest. It includes chapters covering four broad areas, including The Political Front, The Military Front, The Race Front, and The Ideological Front.

Additions to the second edition include a new introduction added to the current introduction by James McPherson a chapter on gender, as well as information on the remembrance of the war (historical memory). The addition of several maps, a timeline, and an appendix listing further reading, battlefield statistics, and battle/regiment/general names focuses the book squarely at undergraduates in both the US and abroad.

Written by leading historians of the mid-nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America's mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War's connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West. As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain's North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America. By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.

"The War for a Nation" provides a brief introduction to the American Civil War from the perspective of military personnel and civilians who participated in the conflict. Susan-Mary Grant brings the war, its many battles, and those who fought them--male and female, black and white--to the center of a riveting narrative that is accessible to general readers and students of American history. "The War for a Nation" explains, in a clear narrative structure, the war's origins, its battles, the expansion of the Union, the struggle for emancipation, and the following saga of Reconstruction. By drawing its examples from primary source documents, first-hand accounts, and scholarly research, "The War for a Nation" introduces readers to the human-interest aspects as well as the historiographical debates surrounding what was the most destructive war ever fought on American soil. Also inlcludes five maps.

"The War for a Nation" provides a brief introduction to the American Civil War from the perspective of military personnel and civilians who participated in the conflict. Susan-Mary Grant brings the war, its many battles, and those who fought them--male and female, black and white--to the center of a riveting narrative that is accessible to general readers and students of American history. "The War for a Nation" explains, in a clear narrative structure, the war's origins, its battles, the expansion of the Union, the struggle for emancipation, and the following saga of Reconstruction. By drawing its examples from primary source documents, first-hand accounts, and scholarly research, "The War for a Nation" introduces readers to the human-interest aspects as well as the historiographical debates surrounding what was the most destructive war ever fought on American soil. Also inlcludes five maps.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was one of the most influential jurists of his time. From the antebellum era and the Civil War through the First World War and into the New Deal years, Holmes' long life and career as a Supreme Court Justice spanned an eventful period of American history, as the country went from an agrarian republic to an industrialized world power. In this concise, engaging book, Susan-Mary Grant puts Holmes' life in national context, exploring how he both shaped and reflected his changing country. She examines the impact of the Civil War on his life and his thinking, his role in key cases ranging from the issue of free speech in Schenck v. United States to the infamous ruling in favor of eugenics in Buck v. Bell, showing how behind Holmes' reputation as a liberal justice lay a more complex approach to law that did not neatly align with political divisions. Including a selection of key primary documents, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. introduces students of U.S., Civil War, and legal history to a game-changing figure and his times.

Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West. As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America. By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.

Born out of violence and the aspirations of its early settlers, the United States of America has become one of the world's most powerful nations. The book begins in colonial America as the first Europeans arrived, lured by the promise of financial profit, driven by religious piety and accompanied by diseases which would ravage the native populations. It explores the tensions inherent in a country built on slave labour in the name of liberty, one forced to assert its unity and reassess its ideals in the face of secession and civil war, and one that struggled to establish moral supremacy, military security and economic stability during the financial crises and global conflicts of the twentieth century. Woven through this richly crafted study of America's shifting social and political landscapes are the multiple voices of the nation's history: slaves and slave owners, revolutionaries and reformers, soldiers and statesmen, immigrants and refugees. These voices help define the United States at the dawn of a new century.

Born out of violence and the aspirations of its early settlers, the United States of America has become one of the world's most powerful nations. The book begins in colonial America as the first Europeans arrived, lured by the promise of financial profit, driven by religious piety and accompanied by diseases which would ravage the native populations. It explores the tensions inherent in a country built on slave labour in the name of liberty, one forced to assert its unity and reassess its ideals in the face of secession and civil war, and one that struggled to establish moral supremacy, military security and economic stability during the financial crises and global conflicts of the twentieth century. Woven through this richly crafted study of America's shifting social and political landscapes are the multiple voices of the nation's history: slaves and slave owners, revolutionaries and reformers, soldiers and statesmen, immigrants and refugees. These voices help define the United States at the dawn of a new century.

In most studies of nationalism, the United States is curiously ignored or is examined only during its colonial and republican periods. But it was the Civil War, argues Susan-Mary Grant, that truly formed the American nation by unifying the states once and for all, abolishing slavery, and setting the country on the path to modernity. In light of this, says Grant, the antebellum period was the crucial phase of American national construction. In "North Over South," Grant offers an original and controversial interpretation of a much discussed but poorly understood period of American history. Despite the attention generally given to Southern nationalism, Grant focuses on what Northerners thought about the South and how their beliefs created a distinct outlook: a Northern nationalism based on opposition to things Southern.

Grant identifies Northern views of the South between 1830 and 1856 and examines how they developed, how they changed, and how they were used by the Republican Party in its first national election campaign. She demonstrates that the Republicans employed negative images of the South to transform Northern regionalism into a self-styled "American nationalism"--at the same time transforming the South into a region antithetical to the nation.

In support of this thesis, Grant examines attitudes toward the South expressed by writers, travelers, and politicians. Focusing on works of such prominent writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and Horace Mann, she shows that the North used the South as a negative point of reference against which to define its own-hence American-identity, effectively excluding the South from full participation in the process of American national construction.

This provocative study links the process of national construction in America with recent studies of European nationalism and fills a gap in the historiography of North-South relations. One of the first scholars to relate new theories of national construction to America, Grant shows that the United States has more in common with the European experience than is often acknowledged and offers a unique and illuminating perspective on the process of American nation-building. Her book will be required reading for anyone interested in antebellum America and the origins of the Civil War.