Download or read book Sam Richards s Civil War Diary written by Samuel P. Richards and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This previously unpublished diary is the best-surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War-era Atlanta. Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) kept a diary for sixty-seven years. This volume excerpts the diary from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City. The Richardses were among the last Confederate loyalists to leave Atlanta. Sam's recollections of the Union bombardment, the evacuation of the city, the looting of his store, and the influx of Yankee forces are riveting. Sam was a Unionist until 1860, when his sentiments shifted in favor of the Confederacy. However, as he wrote in early 1862, he had "no ambition to acquire military renown and glory." Likewise, Sam chafed at financial setbacks caused by the war and at Confederate policies that seemed to limit his freedom. Such conflicted attitudes come through even as Sam writes about civic celebrations, benefit concerts, and the chaotic optimism of life in a strategically critical rebel stronghold. He also reflects with soberness on hospitals filled with wounded soldiers, the threat of epidemics, inflation, and food shortages. A man of deep faith who liked to attend churches all over town, Sam often commments on Atlanta's religious life and grounds his defense of slavery and secession in the Bible. Sam owned and rented slaves, and his diary is a window into race relations at a time when the end of slavery was no longer unthinkable. Perhaps most important, the diary conveys the tenor of Sam's family life. Both Sam and his wife, Sallie, came from families divided politically and geographically by war. They feared for their children's health and mourned for relatives wounded and killed in battle. The figures in Sam Richards's Civil War Diary emerge as real people; the intimate experience of the Civil War home front is conveyed with great power.
Download or read book A Changing Wind written by Wendy Hamand Venet and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1845 Atlanta was the last stop at the end of a railroad line, the home of just twelve families and three general stores. By the 1860s, it was a thriving Confederate city, second only to Richmond in importance. A Changing Wind is the first history to explore what it meant to live in Atlanta during its rapid growth, its devastation in the Civil War, and its rise as a “New South” city during Reconstruction. A Changing Wind brings to life the stories of Atlanta’s diverse citizens. In a rich account of residents’ changing loyalties to the Union and the Confederacy, the book highlights the unequal economic and social impacts of the war, General Sherman’s siege, and the stunning rebirth of the city in postwar years. The final chapter focuses on Atlanta’s collective memory of the Civil War, showing how racial divisions have led to differing views on the war’s meaning and place in the city’s history.
Download or read book The Civil War in Georgia written by John C. Inscoe and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georgians, like all Americans, experienced the Civil War in a variety of ways. Through selected articles drawn from the New Georgia Encyclopedia (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org), this collection chronicles the diversity of Georgia's Civil War experience and reflects the most current scholarship in terms of how the Civil War has come to be studied, documented, and analyzed. The Atlanta campaign and Sherman's March to the Sea changed the course of the war in 1864, in terms both of the upheaval and destruction inflicted on the state and the life span of the Confederacy. While the dramatic events of 1864 are fully documented, this companion gives equal coverage to the many other aspects of the war--naval encounters and guerrilla warfare, prisons and hospitals, factories and plantations, politics and policies-- all of which provided critical support to the Confederacy's war effort. The book also explores home-front conditions in depth, with an emphasis on emancipation, dissent, Unionism, and the experience and activity of African Americans and women. Historians today are far more conscious of how memory--as public commemoration, individual reminiscence, historic preservation, and literary and cinematic depictions--has shaped the war's multiple meanings. Nowhere is this legacy more varied or more pronounced than in Georgia, and a substantial part of this companion explores the many ways in which Georgians have interpreted the war experience for themselves and others over the past 150 years. At the outset of the sesquicentennial these new historical perspectives allow us to appreciate the Civil War as a complex and multifaceted experience for Georgians and for all southerners. A Project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia; Published in Association with the Georgia Humanities Council and the University System of Georgia/GALILEO.
Download or read book Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers written by John M. Sacher and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-12-08 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Finalist for the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize In April 1862, the Confederacy faced a dire military situation. Its forces were badly outnumbered, the Union army was threatening on all sides, and the twelve-month enlistment period for original volunteers would soon expire. In response to these circumstances, the Confederate Congress passed the first national conscription law in United States history. This initiative touched off a struggle for healthy white male bodies—both for the army and on the home front, where they oversaw enslaved laborers and helped produce food and supplies for the front lines—that lasted till the end of the war. John M. Sacher’s history of Confederate conscription serves as the first comprehensive examination of the topic in nearly one hundred years, providing fresh insights into and drawing new conclusions about the southern draft program. Often summarily dismissed as a detested policy that violated states’ rights and forced nonslaveholders to fight for planters, the conscription law elicited strong responses from southerners wanting to devise the best way to guarantee what they perceived as shared sacrifice. Most who bristled at the compulsory draft did so believing it did not align with their vision of the Confederacy. As Sacher reveals, white southerners’ desire to protect their families, support their communities, and ensure the continuation of slavery shaped their reaction to conscription. For three years, Confederates tried to achieve victory on the battlefield while simultaneously promoting their vision of individual liberty for whites and states’ rights. While they failed in that quest, Sacher demonstrates that southerners’ response to the 1862 conscription law did not determine their commitment to the Confederate cause. Instead, the implementation of the draft spurred a debate about sacrifice—both physical and ideological—as the Confederacy’s insatiable demand for soldiers only grew in the face of a grueling war.
Download or read book Maryland My Maryland written by James A. Davis and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long treated the patriotic anthems of the American Civil War as colorful, if largely insignificant, side notes. Beneath the surface of these songs, however, is a complex story. “Maryland, My Maryland” was one of the most popular Confederate songs during the American Civil War, yet its story is full of ironies that draw attention to the often painful and contradictory actions and beliefs that were both cause and effect of the war. Most telling of all, it was adopted as one of a handful of Southern anthems even though it celebrated a state that never joined the Confederacy. In Maryland, My Maryland: Music and Patriotism during the American Civil War James A. Davis illuminates the incongruities underlying this Civil War anthem and what they reveal about patriotism during the war. The geographic specificity of the song’s lyrics allowed the contest between regional and national loyalties to be fought on bandstands as well as battlefields and enabled “Maryland, My Maryland” to contribute to the shift in patriotic allegiance from a specific, localized, and material place to an ambiguous, inclusive, and imagined space. Musical patriotism, it turns out, was easy to perform but hard to define for Civil War–era Americans.
Download or read book Inglorious Passages written by Brian Steel Wills and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died in the Civil War, two-thirds, by some estimates, were felled by disease; untold others were lost to accidents, murder, suicide, sunstroke, and drowning. Meanwhile thousands of civilians in both the north and south perished—in factories, while caught up in battles near their homes, and in other circumstances associated with wartime production and supply. These “inglorious passages,” no less than the deaths of soldiers in combat, devastated the armies in the field and families and communities at home. Inglorious Passages for the first time gives these noncombat deaths due consideration. In letters, diaries, obituaries, and other accounts, eminent Civil War historian Brian Steel Wills finds the powerful and poignant stories of fatal accidents and encounters and collateral civilian deaths that occurred in the factories and fields of the Union and the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865. Wills retrieves these stories from obscurity and the cold calculations of statistics to reveal the grave toll these losses exacted on soldiers and civilians, families and society. In its intimate details and its broad scope, his book demonstrates that for those who served and those who supported them, noncombat fatalities were as significant as battle deaths in impressing the full force of the American Civil War on the people called upon to live through it. With the publication of Inglorious Passages, those who paid the supreme sacrifice, regardless of situation or circumstance, will at last be included in the final tabulation of the nation’s bloodiest conflict.
Download or read book A Hudson Valley Reckoning written by Debra Bruno and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Hudson Valley Reckoning tells the long-ignored story of slavery's history in upstate New York through Debra Bruno's absorbing chronicle that uncovers her Dutch ancestors' slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned. Bruno, who grew up in New York's Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, was shaken when a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family's past. In the last will and testament of her ancestor, she found the first evidence: human beings bequeathed to his family along with animals and furniture. The more she expanded her family tree, the more enslavers she found. She reached out to Black Americans tracing their own ancestry, and by serendipitous luck became friends with Eleanor C. Mire, a descendent of a woman enslaved by Bruno's Dutch ancestors. A Hudson Valley Reckoning recounts Bruno's journey into the nearly forgotten history of Northern slavery and of the thousands of enslaved people brought in chains to Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. With the help of Mire, who provides a moving epilogue, Debra Bruno tells the story of white and Black lives impacted by the stain of slavery and its long legacy of racism, as she investigates the erasure of the uncomfortable truths about our family and national histories.
Download or read book Fighting for Atlanta written by Earl J. Hess and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As William T. Sherman's Union troops began their campaign for Atlanta in the spring of 1864, they encountered Confederate forces employing field fortifications located to take advantage of rugged terrain. While the Confederates consistently acted on the defensive, digging eighteen lines of earthworks from May to September, the Federals used fieldworks both defensively and offensively. With 160,000 troops engaged on both sides and hundreds of miles of trenches dug, fortifications became a defining factor in the Atlanta campaign battles. These engagements took place on topography ranging from Appalachian foothills to the clay fields of Georgia's piedmont. Leading military historian Earl J. Hess examines how commanders adapted their operations to the physical environment, how the environment in turn affected their movements, and how Civil War armies altered the terrain through the science of field fortification. He also illuminates the impact of fighting and living in ditches for four months on the everyday lives of both Union and Confederate soldiers. The Atlanta campaign represents one of the best examples of a prolonged Union invasion deep into southern territory, and, as Hess reveals, it marked another important transition in the conduct of war from open field battles to fighting from improvised field fortifications.
Download or read book July 22 written by Earl J. Hess and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So remarkable was the fighting to the east of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, that it earned its place as the only engagement of the Civil War to be widely referred to by the date of its occurrence. Also known as the Battle of Atlanta, this was the largest engagement of the four-month-long Atlanta Campaign for control of the city and the region. Although Confederate commander John Bell Hood’s forces flanked William T. Sherman’s line and were able to crush the end of it, they could go no further. On July 22, 1864, the Confederates came closer to achieving a major tactical victory than on any other day of the Atlanta Campaign. Prolific Civil War historian Earl Hess’s July 22 is a thorough study of all aspects of the most prominent battle of the Civil War’s Atlanta Campaign. Based on exhaustive research in primary sources, Hess has crafted a unique and compelling study of not only the tactics and strategy associated with the engagement but also of the personal experiences of Union and Confederate soldiers and the effects the battle had on them. This book offers fresh insights to the significance that the Battle of July 22 held for the larger Atlanta campaign and the entire Union war effort. Hess also provides a thorough discussion of the death of Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson, the most prominent casualty of the battle, and the effect this loss had on Union soldiers and civilians alike. He concludes with an assessment of the battle’s legacy in American history and culture. Detailing one of the larger and more vigorously fought battles of the Civil War, Hess’s treatment of the Battle of Atlanta stands out as a strong example of Civil War operational history. The combination of maneuver, unit handling, stout combat by the individual soldier, and combative spirit on both sides make July 22 one of the most fascinating and remarkable battles in American history. There is much for the student of military history to learn on many levels of tactics, the experience of combat, and battlefield leadership.
Download or read book Atlanta s Stone Mountain written by Paul Stephen Hudson and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The breathtaking geological wonder known as Stone Mountain has enchanted people since the age of the Paleo-Indians. Today, Stone Mountain Park annually attracts four million visitors from around the world. Hiking trails showcase rugged granite outcrops with hardy mountain plants, such as endearing yellow daisies. Majestic red-tailed hawks soar overhead. A storied past comes to life through an engaging park quarry exhibit, a historic railroad experience and an epic Confederate Memorial carving envisioned by Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame. Writing during the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, authors Paul Hudson and Lora Mirza of Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta present with verve this illustrated multicultural history of a legendary landmark.
Download or read book An Unholy Traffic written by Robert K. D. Colby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, enslavers bought and sold thousands of people, extending a traffic in humanity that had long underpinned American slavery. Despite the pressures of blockades, economic collapse, and unfolding emancipation, the slave trade survived to the war's end. This book provides a vivid look at life within the trade in slaves and tells the story of the wartime slave trade from the perspective of both participants in it and those subjected to it.
Download or read book Gone but Not Forgotten written by Wendy Hamand Venet and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the differing ways that Atlantans have remembered the Civil War since its end in 1865. During the Civil War, Atlanta became the second-most important city in the Confederacy after Richmond, Virginia. Since 1865, Atlanta’s civic and business leaders promoted the city’s image as a “phoenix city” rising from the ashes of General William T. Sherman’s wartime destruction. According to this carefully constructed view, Atlanta honored its Confederate past while moving forward with financial growth and civic progress in the New South. But African Americans challenged this narrative with an alternate one focused on the legacy of slavery, the meaning of freedom, and the pervasive racism of the postwar city. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Atlanta’s white and black Civil War narratives collided. Wendy Hamand Venet examines the memorialization of the Civil War in Atlanta and who benefits from the specific narratives that have been constructed around it. She explores veterans’ reunions, memoirs and novels, and the complex and ever-changing interpretation of commemorative monuments. Despite its economic success since 1865, Atlanta is a city where the meaning of the Civil War and its iconography continue to be debated and contested.
Download or read book Thirsty City written by Skye Borden and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the evolution of Atlantas water system and charts the poor urban planning decisions that created the citys current water shortage. Atlanta is running out of water and is in the midst of a water crisis. Its crumbling infrastructure spews toxic waste and raw sewage into neighboring streams. A tri-state water war between Alabama, Florida, and Georgia has been raging since 1990, with Atlanta caught in the middle; however, the citys problems have been more than a century in the making. In Thirsty City, Skye Borden tells the complete story of how Atlantas water ran dry. Using detailed historical research, legal analysis, and personal accounts, she explores the evolution of Atlantas water system as well as charts the poor urban planning decisions that led to the citys current woes. She also uncovers the loopholes in local, state, and federal environmental laws that have enabled urban planners to shirk responsibility for ongoing water quantity and quality problems. From the citys unfortunate location to its present-day debacle, Thirsty City is a fascinating and highly readable account that reveals how Atlantas quest for water is riddled with shortsighted decisions, unchecked greed, political corruption, and racial animus. Instead of a date-filled, statistically laden work of history and law, Borden weaves a compelling story full of interesting asides and biographical anecdotes. I found the history fascinating. It represents a real contribution to the literature. William L. Andreen, University of Alabama School of Law
Download or read book Breaking the Heartland written by John D. Fowler and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War was arguably the watershed event in the history of the United States, forever changing the nature of the Republic and the relationship of individuals to their government. The war ended slavery and initiated the long road toward racial equality. The United States now stands at the sesquicentennial of that event, and its citizens attempt to arrive at an understanding of what that event meant to the past, present, and future of the nation. Few states had a greater impact on the outcome of the nation⿿s greatest calamity than Georgia. Georgia provided 125,000 soldiers for the Confederacy as well as thousands more for the Union cause. Also, many of the Confederacy⿿s most influential military and civilian leaders hailed from the state. Georgia was vital to the Confederate war effort because of its agricultural and industrial output. The Confederacy had little hope of winning without the farms and shops of the state. Moreover, the state was critical to the Southern infrastructure because of the river and rail links that crossed it and connected the western Confederacy to the eastern half. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the war was arguably decided in North Georgia with the Atlanta Campaign and Lincoln⿿s subsequent reelection. This campaign was the last forlorn hope for the Southern Republic and the Union⿿s greatest triumph. Despite the state⿿s importance to the Confederacy and the war⿿s ultimate outcome, not enough has been written concerning Georgia⿿s experience during those turbulent years. The essays in this volume attempt to redress this dearth of scholarship. They present a mosaic of events, places, and people, exploring the impact of the war on Georgia and its residents and demonstrating the importance of the state to the outcome of the Civil War.
Download or read book Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Atlanta Cradle of the New South written by William A. Link and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War's Aftermath
Download or read book The Home Voices Speak Louder Than the Drums written by Wanda Easter Burch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Soldier mortals would not survive if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope," wrote Confederate Private Henry Graves in the trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia. "The second angel of mercy is the night dream." Providing fresh perspective on the human side of the Civil War, this book explores the dreams and imaginings of those who fought it, as recorded in their letters, journals and memoirs. Sometimes published as poems or songs or printed in newspapers, these rarely acknowledged writings reflect the personalities and experiences of their authors. Some expressions of fear, pain, loss, homesickness and disappointment are related with grim fatalism, some with glimpses of humor.
