Download or read book Why the South Lost the Civil War written by and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1991-09-01 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a chronological account of the Civil War, reexamines theories for the South's defeat, and analyzes Confederate and Union military strategy

Download or read book How Robert E Lee Lost the Civil War written by Edward H. Bonekemper and published by Sergeant Kirkland's Press. This book was released on 1999-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the general view that Robert E. Lee was a military genius who staved off inevitable Confederate defeat against insurmountable odds. Instead, the author contends that Lee was responsible for the South's loss in a war it could have won. Instead, as this book demonstrates, Lee unnecessarily went for the win, squandered his irreplaceable troops, and weakened his army so badly that military defeat became inevitable. It describes how Lee's army took 80,000 casualties in Lees first fourteen months of command-while imposing 73,000 casualties on his opponents. With the Confederacy outnumbered four to one, Lee's aggressive strategy and tactics proved to be suicidal. Also described arc Lee's failure to take charge of the battlefield (such as on the second day of Gettysburg), his overly complex and ineffective battle plans (such as those at Antietam and during the Seven Days' campaign), and his vague and ambiguous orders (such as those that deprived him of Jeb Stuart's services for most of Gettysburg). Bonekemper looks beyond Lee's battles in the East and describes how Lee's Virginia-first myopia played a major role in crucial Confederate failures in the West. He itemizes Lee's refusals to provide reinforcements for Vicksburg or Tennessee in mid-1863, his causing James Longstreet to arrive at Chickamauga with only a third of his troops, his idea to move Longstreet away from Chattanooga just before Grant's troops broke through the undeemanned Confederates there, and his failure to reinforce Atlanta in the critical months before the 1864 presidential election. Bonekemper argues that Lee's ultimate failure was his prolonging of the hopeless and bloody slaughter even afterUnion victory had been ensured by a series of events: the fall of Atlanta, the re-election of Lincoln, and the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. Finally, the author explores historians' treatment of Lee, including the deification of him by failed Confederate generals attempting to resurrect their own reputations. Readers will not fred themselves feeling neutral about this stinging critique of the hero of The Lost Cause.

Download or read book Lost Civil War written by Laura DeMarco and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique visual guide to America's war between the states, told through those sites swept aside by development or decay Take a journey through lost civil war battlefields in this photographic guide to the many historic sites that have been destroyed or become overgrown over the centuries. A companion title to the 150,000-copy-selling Civil War Battlefields Then and Now, this is a unique collection of lost Civil War heritage that features a wide range of sites, arranged thematically and illustrated with original photographs throughout. Featured locations include: Encampments: Over-wintering camps and winter quarters were widely photographed. Historic buildings: Many of the original buildings were destroyed and have been rebuilt. These include the McLean House in Appomattox and the Ford Theatre in Washington DC, with many others completely destroyed. Prisons: Those featured included Libby Prison, which was dismantled and the bricks shipped to Chicago for the Exhibition; Andersonville Prison and Capitol Prison in Washington DC, and Castle Pinckney in Charleston Harbor. Cycloramas: There was such an interest in seeing re-enactments of the Civil War that many cycloramas were built especially to show re-runs of Gettysburg. Including such curiosities as a list of the longest-living Civil War veterans, the guide also features an up-to-date survey of Confederate statues and memorials and their complicated and often controversial legacy in the 21st century.

Download or read book Why the Confederacy Lost written by Gabor S. Boritt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Civil War, someone asked General Pickett why the Battle of Gettysburg had been lost: Was it Lee's error in taking the offensive, the tardiness of Ewell and Early, or Longstreet's hesitation in attacking? Pickett scratched his head and replied, "I've always thought the Yankees had something to do with it." This simple fact, writes James McPherson, has escaped a generation of historians who have looked to faulty morale, population, economics, and dissent as the causes of Confederate failure. These were all factors, he writes, but the Civil War was still a war--won by the Union army through key victories at key moments. With this brilliant review of how historians have explained the Southern defeat, McPherson opens a fascinating account by several leading historians of how the Union broke the Confederate rebellion. In every chapter, the military struggle takes center stage, as the authors reveal how battlefield decisions shaped the very forces that many scholars (putting the cart before the horse) claim determined the outcome of the war. Archer Jones examines the strategy of the two sides, showing how each had to match its military planning to political necessity. Lee raided north of the Potomac with one eye on European recognition and the other on Northern public opinion--but his inevitable retreats looked like failure to the Southern public. The North, however, developed a strategy of deep raids that was extremely effective because it served a valuable political as well as military purpose, shattering Southern morale by tearing up the interior. Gary Gallagher takes a hard look at the role of generals, narrowing his focus to the crucial triumvirate of Lee, Grant, and Sherman, who towered above the others. Lee's aggressiveness may have been costly, but he well knew the political impact of his spectacular victories; Grant and Sherman, meanwhile, were the first Union generals to fully harness Northern resources and carry out coordinated campaigns. Reid Mitchell shows how the Union's advantage in numbers was enhanced by a dedication and perseverance of federal troops that was not matched by the Confederates after their home front began to collapse. And Joseph Glatthaar examines black troops, whose role is entering the realm of national myth. In 1960, there appeared a collection of essays by major historians, entitled Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald; it is now in its twenty-sixth printing, having sold well over 100,000 copies. Why the Confederacy Lost provides a parallel volume, written by today's leading authorities. Provocatively argued and engagingly written, this work reminds us that the hard-won triumph of the North was far from inevitable.

Download or read book The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History written by Gary W. Gallagher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-11-22 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “well-reasoned and timely” (Booklist) essay collection interrogates the Lost Cause myth in Civil War historiography. Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states’ rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately, skillful propagandists have been so successful in promoting this romanticized view that the Lost Cause has assumed a life of its own. Misrepresenting the war’s true origins and its actual course, the myth of the Lost Cause distorts our national memory. In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, nine historians describe and analyze the Lost Cause, identifying ways in which it falsifies history—creating a volume that makes a significant contribution to Civil War historiography. “The Lost Cause . . . is a tangible and influential phenomenon in American culture and this book provides an excellent source for anyone seeking to explore its various dimensions.” —Southern Historian

Download or read book Burying the Dead but Not the Past written by Caroline E. Janney and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.

Download or read book Causes Won Lost and Forgotten written by Gary W. Gallagher and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 60,000 books have been published on the Civil War. Most Americans, though, get their ideas about the war--why it was fought, what was won, what was lost--not from books but from movies, television, and other popular media. In an engaging and accessible survey, Gary W. Gallagher guides readers through the stories told in recent film and art, showing how these stories have both reflected and influenced the political, social, and racial currents of their times.

Download or read book The Lost Colony of the Confederacy written by Eugene C. Harter and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lost Colony of the Confederacy is the story of a grim, quixotic journey of twenty thousand Confederates to Brazil at the end of the American Civil War. Although it is not known how many Confederates migrated to South America-estimates range from eight thousand to forty thousand-their departure was fueled by bitterness over a lost cause and a distaste for an oppressive victor. Encouraged by Emperor Dom Pedro, most of these exiles settled in Brazil. Although at the time of the Civil War the exodus was widely known and discussed as an indicator of the resentment against the Northern invaders and strict governmental measures, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy is the first book to focus on this mass migration. Eugene Harter vividly describes the lives of these last Confederates who founded their own city and were called Os Confederados. They retained much of their Southernness and lent an American flavor to Brazilian culture. First published in 1985, this work details the background of the exodus and describes the life of the twentiethcentury descendants, who have a strong link both to Southern history and to modern Brazil. The fires have cooled, but it is useful to understand the intense feelings that sparked the migration to Brazil. Southern ways have melded into Brazilian, and both are linked by the unbreakable bonds of history, as shown in this revealing account. The late EUGENE C. HARTER retired from the U.S. Senior Foreign Service and lived in Chestertown, Maryland, until his death in 2010. He was the grandson and greatgrandson of Confederates who left Texas and Mississippi as a part of the great Confederate migration in the late 1860s. Harter is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Download or read book The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History written by Gary W. Gallagher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederate States in the Civil War was and is an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of southerners to rationalise the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately, for historical truth and the national memory, these skilful propagandists, beginning with Jubal Early, have been so successful that the Lost Cause has assumed a life of its own and continues to misrepresent what really happened, distorting the national memory in the process. In this book, nine historians analyse the Lost Cause, describing its content and identifying its falsity. The work is thus a major contribution to Civil War historiography.

Download or read book After Lincoln written by A. J. Langguth and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by radical Republicans in Congress, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver. By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, "I'm afraid I'm elected." His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by implacable Southern resistance and by corruption during his two terms.--From publisher description.

Download or read book What Though the Field Be Lost written by Christopher Kempf and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-01-27 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on two years living and researching in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, What Though the Field Be Lost uses the battlefield there as a way to engage ongoing issues involving race, regional identity, and the ethics of memory. With empathy and humility, Kempf reveals the overlapping planes of historical past and public present, integrating archival material—language from monuments, soldiers' letters, eyewitness accounts of the battle—with reflection on present-day social and political unrest. Here monument protests, police shootings, and heated battle reenactments expose the ambivalences and evasions involved in the consolidation of national (and nationalist) identity. In What Though the Field Be Lost, Kempf shows that, though the Civil War may be over, the field at Gettysburg and all that it stands for remain sharply contested. Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, What Though the Field Be Lost examines the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy.

Download or read book The Myth of the Lost Cause written by Edward H. Bonekemper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History isn't always written by the winners... Twenty-first-century controversies over Confederate monuments attest to the enduring significance of our nineteenth-century Civil War. As Lincoln knew, the meaning of America itself depends on how we understand that fratricidal struggle. As soon as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms at Appomattox, a group of Confederate officers took up their pens to refight the war for the history books. They composed a new narrative—the Myth of the Lost Cause—seeking to ennoble the sacrifice and defeat of the South, which popular historians in the twentieth century would perpetuate. Unfortunately, that myth would distort the historical imagination of Americans, north and south, for 150 years. In this balanced and compelling correction of the historical record, Edward Bonekemper helps us understand the Myth of the Lost Cause and its effect on the social and political controversies that are still important to all Americans.

Download or read book Ends of War written by Caroline E. Janney and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Army of Northern Virginia's chaotic dispersal began even before Lee and Grant met at Appomattox Court House. As the Confederates had pushed west at a relentless pace for nearly a week, thousands of wounded and exhausted men fell out of the ranks. When word spread that Lee planned to surrender, most remaining troops stacked their arms and accepted paroles allowing them to return home, even as they lamented the loss of their country and cause. But others broke south and west, hoping to continue the fight. Fearing a guerrilla war, Grant extended the generous Appomattox terms to every rebel who would surrender himself. Provost marshals fanned out across Virginia and beyond, seeking nearly 18,000 of Lee's men who had yet to surrender. But the shock of Lincoln's assassination led Northern authorities to see threats of new rebellion in every rail depot and harbor where Confederates gathered for transport, even among those already paroled. While Federal troops struggled to keep order and sustain a fragile peace, their newly surrendered adversaries seethed with anger and confusion at the sight of Union troops occupying their towns and former slaves celebrating freedom. In this dramatic new history of the weeks and months after Appomattox, Caroline E. Janney reveals that Lee's surrender was less an ending than the start of an interregnum marked by military and political uncertainty, legal and logistical confusion, and continued outbursts of violence. Janney takes readers from the deliberations of government and military authorities to the ground-level experiences of common soldiers. Ultimately, what unfolds is the messy birth narrative of the Lost Cause, laying the groundwork for the defiant resilience of rebellion in the years that followed.

Download or read book Lost and Buried Treasures of the Civil War written by W.C. Jameson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most compelling and exciting tales of lost and buried treasures associated with the Civil War have been collected, extensively researched and investigated, and are included in this entertaining book from one of America's foremost treasure hunters. They represent fortunes that have been lost for over one-and-a-half centuries and involve colorful characters from lowly privates up to famous officers, including Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. The thirty-one tales in this book provide backstory and pertinent information, are distributed between the Union and Confederate armies, and range from Texas to the Atlantic Cost, from Louisiana to the Canadian border.

Download or read book The Next Civil War written by Stephen Marche and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Well researched and eloquently presented.” —The Atlantic * “Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary.” —The New York Times Book Review A celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts—and tips America over the edge into ruin. These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists—journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels. No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government.

Download or read book Lost Boy Lost Girl written by John Bul Dau and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of thousands of children who fled strife in southern Sudan, John Bul Dau survived hunger, exhaustion, and violence. His wife, Martha, endured similar hardships. In this memorable book, the two convey the best of African values while relating searing accounts of famine and war. There’s warmth as well, in their humorous tales of adapting to American life. For its importance as a primary source, for its inclusion of the rarely told female perspective of Sudan’s lost children, for its celebration of human resilience, this is the perfect story to inform and inspire young readers.

Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.