Download or read book Why the Civil War Came written by David W. Blight and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Captain George S. James ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter, beginning a war that would last four years and claim many lives. This book brings together a collection of voices to help explain the commencement of Am.

Download or read book Why the Civil War Came written by Gabor S. Boritt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Captain George S. James ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter, beginning a war that would last four horrific years and claim a staggering number of lives. Since that fateful day, the debate over the causes of the American Civil War has never ceased. What events were instrumental in bringing it about? How did individuals and institutions function? What did Northerners and Southerners believe in the decades of strife preceding the war? What steps did they take to avoid war? Indeed, was the great armed conflict avoidable at all? Why the Civil War Came brings a talented chorus of voices together to recapture the feel of a very different time and place, helping the reader to grasp more fully the commencement of our bloodiest war. From William W. Freehling's discussion of the peculiarities of North American slavery to Charles Royster's disturbing piece on the combatants' savage readiness to fight, the contributors bring to life the climate of a country on the brink of disaster. Mark Summers, for instance, depicts the tragically jubilant first weeks of Northern recruitment, when Americans on both sides were as yet unaware of the hellish slaughter that awaited them. Glenna Matthews underscores the important war-catalyzing role played by extraordinary public women, who proved that neither side of the Mason-Dixon line was as patriarchal as is thought. David Blight reveals an African-American world that "knew what time it was," and welcomed war. And Gabor Boritt examines the struggle's central figure, Lincoln himself, illuminating in the years leading up to the war a blindness on the future president's part, an unwillingness to confront the looming calamity that was about to smash the nation asunder. William E. Gienapp notes perhaps the most unsettling fact about the Civil War, that democratic institutions could not resolve the slavery issue without resorting to violence on an epic scale. With gripping detail, Why the Civil War Came takes readers back to a country fraught with bitterness, confusion, and hatred--a country ripe for a war of unprecedented bloodshed--to show why democracy failed, and violence reigned.

Download or read book What Caused the Civil War Reflections on the South and Southern History written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.

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 Armies of Deliverance written by Elizabeth R. Varon and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims.

Download or read book America Aflame written by David Goldfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

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 Civil War written by Louis P. Masur and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred and fifty years after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still captures the American imagination, and its reverberations can still be felt throughout America's social and political landscape. Louis P. Masur's The Civil War: A Concise History offers a masterful and eminently readable overview of the war's multiple causes and catastrophic effects. Masur begins by examining the complex origins of the war, focusing on the pulsating tensions over states rights and slavery. The book then proceeds to cover, year by year, the major political, social, and military events, highlighting two important themes: how the war shifted from a limited conflict to restore the Union to an all-out war that would fundamentally transform Southern society, and the process by which the war ultimately became a battle to abolish slavery. Masur explains how the war turned what had been a loose collection of fiercely independent states into a nation, remaking its political, cultural, and social institutions. But he also focuses on the soldiers themselves, both Union and Confederate, whose stories constitute nothing less than America's Iliad. In the final chapter Masur considers the aftermath of the South's surrender at Appomattox and the clash over the policies of reconstruction that continued to divide President and Congress, conservatives and radicals, Southerners and Northerners for years to come. In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley wrote that the war had "wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." From the vantage of the war's sesquicentennial, this concise history of the entire Civil War era offers an invaluable introduction to the dramatic events whose effects are still felt today.

Download or read book A More Civil War written by D. H. Dilbeck and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, Americans confronted profound moral problems about how to fight in the conflict. In this innovative book, D. H. Dilbeck reveals how the Union sought to wage a just war against the Confederacy. He shows that northerners fought according to a distinct "moral vision of war," an array of ideas about the nature of a truly just and humane military effort. Dilbeck tells how Union commanders crafted rules of conduct to ensure their soldiers defeated the Confederacy as swiftly as possible while also limiting the total destruction unleashed by the fighting. Dilbeck explores how Union soldiers abided by official just-war policies as they battled guerrillas, occupied cities, retaliated against enemy soldiers, and came into contact with Confederate civilians. In contrast to recent scholarship focused solely on the Civil War's carnage, Dilbeck details how the Union sought both to deal sternly with Confederates and to adhere to certain constraints. The Union's earnest effort to wage a just war ultimately helped give the Civil War its distinct character, a blend of immense destruction and remarkable restraint.

Download or read book How the South Won the Civil War written by Heather Cox Richardson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies. The South and West equally depended on extractive industries-cotton in the former and mining, cattle, and oil in the latter-giving rise a new birth of white male oligarchy, despite the guarantees provided by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the economic opportunities afforded by expansion. To reveal why this happened, How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and subordination woven into the nation's fabric and identity. At the nation's founding, it was the Eastern "yeoman farmer" who galvanized and symbolized the American Revolution. After the Civil War, that mantle was assumed by the Western cowboy, singlehandedly defending his land against barbarians and savages as well as from a rapacious government. New states entered the Union in the late nineteenth century and western and southern leaders found yet more common ground. As resources and people streamed into the West during the New Deal and World War II, the region's influence grew. "Movement Conservatives," led by westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, claimed to embody cowboy individualism and worked with Dixiecrats to embrace the ideology of the Confederacy. Richardson's searing book seizes upon the soul of the country and its ongoing struggle to provide equal opportunity to all. Debunking the myth that the Civil War released the nation from the grip of oligarchy, expunging the sins of the Founding, it reveals how and why the Old South not only survived in the West, but thrived.

Download or read book When the Yankees Came written by Stephen V. Ash and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southerners whose communities were invaded by the Union army during the Civil War endured a profoundly painful ordeal. For most, the coming of the Yankees was a nightmare become real; for some, it was the answer to a prayer. But as Stephen Ash argues, for all, invasion and occupation were essential parts of the experience of defeat that helped shape the southern postwar mentality. When the Yankees Came is the first comprehensive study of the occupied South, bringing to light a wealth of new information about the southern home front. Among the intriguing topics Ash explores are guerrilla warfare and other forms of civilian resistance; the evolution of Union occupation policy from leniency to repression; the impact of occupation on families, churches, and local government; and conflicts between southern aristocrats and poor whites. In analyzing these topics, Ash examines events from the perspective not only of southerners but also of the northern invaders, and he shows how the experiences of southerners differed according to their distance from a garrisoned town.

Download or read book Disunion written by Elizabeth R. Varon and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.

Download or read book 1861 written by Adam Goodheart and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom. An epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision. Hailed as “exhilarating….Inspiring…Irresistible…” by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart’s bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations.

Download or read book The Gettysburg Address written by Abraham Lincoln and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Download or read book The American Civil War written by John Keegan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest military historian of our time gives a peerless account of America’s most bloody, wrenching, and eternally fascinating war. In this magesterial history and national bestseller, John Keegan shares his original and perceptive insights into the psychology, ideology, demographics, and economics of the American Civil War. Illuminated by Keegan’s knowledge of military history he provides a fascinating look at how command and the slow evolution of its strategic logic influenced the course of the war. Above all, The American Civil War gives an intriguing account of how the scope of the conflict combined with American geography to present a uniquely complex and challenging battle space. Irresistibly written and incisive in its analysis, this is an indispensable account of America’s greatest conflict.

Download or read book Causes of the Civil War written by James F. Epperson and published by Ottn Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explains the causes of the American Civil War, including legislative efforts to prevent the conflict, and the rising sectional tensions during the 1850s that ultimately led to rebellion by the Southern states"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book For Cause and Comrades written by James M. McPherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.