The Civil War
Teacher Inquiry Kiosk

Books

Ayers, Edward L.  "In the Presence of Mine Enemies:  War in the Heart of America," 1859-1863.  New York:  W.W. Norton, 2003.

Professor of History at the University of Virginia
“Ayers covers the early Civil War histories of two border counties in the Great Valley spanning Pennsylvania and Virginia: Franklin (Chambersburg) and Augusta (Staunton), respectively. This first volume of his case study treats the lives of ordinary citizens who had initially opposed the concept of disunion and then, swept along by national events, embraced both secession and its armed resistance with fanatical zeal. From First Manassas to Chancellorsville, the author delves into what the war's dire consequences meant to these communities: loss of life, impressment of slaves and commodities, economic dislocation, human privation, political infighting, and intolerance, as reflective of a suffering nation. Ayers insightfully observes that Franklin residents waged war to maintain connection with a slaveocracy they despised, while Augusta's population risked all in order to secure "property rights" that had never been challenged in any concrete way. He concludes that the secret of the Civil War was that so many Americans wanted it to come to demonstrate that they held God's favor.” (Abstract adapted from a review by John Carver Edwards, published in the Library Journal 128, no. 11 (15 June 2003):  84.)

Berlin, Ira.  "Free at Last:  a Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War." New York:  The New Press, 1992.

Professor of History at the University of Maryland
“Drawn from letters, affidavits, records, and other documents collected by The Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Free at Last gives voice to compelling observations about slavery written by both blacks and whites, in the North and South, during the Civil War. Ranging from clever rhetoric to personal accounts of unspeakable cruelty, the documents display crude eloquence and sophisticated commentary together, without correction or alteration. Editorial annotations provide a unifying narrative thread.” (Abstract adapted from a review by Lawrence E. Ellis, published in the Library Journal 117, no. 21 (December 1992):  157.)

Blanton, DeAnne and Lauren M. Cook.  "They Fought Like Demons:  Women Soldiers in the American Civil War."  Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

DeAnne Blanton is a military archivist at the National Archives in Washington D.C.  Lauren M. Cook is an employee at Fayetteville State University.
“At least 250 women served-disguised as men-in the ranks of both North and South during the Civil War. Although works about female Civil War soldiers have appeared over the past several years, this volume makes a nice summation. After covering the major combat actions in which women served (and in which several were killed), the authors reconstruct the reasons why women entered the armed forces: many were simply patriotic, while others followed their husbands or lovers and yet others yearned to break free from the constraints that Victorian society had laid on them as women. Blanton and Cook detail women soldiers in combat, on the march, in camp and in the hospital, where many were discovered after getting sick. Some even wound up in grim prisons kept by both sides, while a few hid pregnancies and were only discovered after giving birth. Many times the rank and file hid them from officers, who were duty-bound to discharge women if they were found out.” (Adapted from a review published in Publisher’s Weekly, published in 2002)

Blight, David W.  "Race and Reunion:  the Civil War in American Memory."  Cambridge:      Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

Professor of History at Amherst College
“Blight traces America's tragic pursuit of national reunification and reconciliation after the Civil War at the expense of the conflict's emancipationist legacy. He ponders such threats to this legacy as Lost Cause myths, fading and sometimes revisionist veteran recollections, financial panics and commercial greed, political scandals, "loyal" slave narratives, urbanization and industrialization, and the emotionally charged rituals of war-related celebration days, among others. The author resurrects the voices and prose of African American activists who fought to preserve the emancipationist legacy in an indifferent, even hostile, milieu. Blight notes that the process of national reconstruction was rooted in an American paradox: "the imperative of healing and the imperative of justice could not, ultimately, cohabit the same house. The one was the prisoner of memory, the other a creature of law." (Abstract adapted from a review by John Carver Edwards, published in the Library Journal 125, no. 20 (Dec. 2000):  158-160.)

Cashin, Joan E.  "The War Was You and Me:  Civilians in the American Civil War." Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2002.

Professor of History at Rutgers University
“Though civilians constituted the majority of the nation's population and were intimately involved with almost every aspect of the war, we know little about the civilian experience of the Civil War. That experience was inherently dramatic. Southerners lived through the breakup of basic social and economic institutions, including, of course, slavery. Northerners witnessed the reorganization of society to fight the war. And citizens of the border regions grappled with elemental questions of loyalty that reached into the family itself. These original essays--all commissioned from established scholars, based on archival research, and written for a wide readership--recover the stories of civilians from Natchez to New England. They address the experiences of men, women, and children; of whites, slaves, and free blacks; and of civilians from numerous classes. Not least of these stories are the on-the-ground experiences of slaves seeking emancipation and the actions of white Northerners who resisted the draft.” (Summary from book cover)

Faust, Drew Gilpin.  "Mothers of Invention:  Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War."  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Professor of History at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University
“Faust makes a major contribution to both Civil War historiography and women's studies in this outstanding analysis of the impact of secession, invasion and conquest on Southern white women. Antebellum images based on helplessness and dependence were challenged as women assumed an increasing range of social and economic responsibilities. Their successes were, however, at best mixed, involving high levels of improvisation. The failure of Southern men to sustain their patriarchal pretensions on the battlefield also broke the prewar gender contract of dependence in return for protection. Women of the South after 1865 confronted both their doubt about what they could accomplish by themselves and their desire to avoid reliance on men. The women's rights movement in the South thus grew from necessity and disappointment-a sharp contrast to the ebullient optimism of its Northern counterpart.”  (Abstract adapted from a review in Publisher’s Weekly)

Glatthaar, Joseph T.  "Forged in Battle:  the Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers."  New York:  Free Press, 1990.

Professor of History at the University of Houston
“Sixteen months after the start of the American Civil War, the Federal government, having vastly underestimated the length and manpower demands of the war, began to recruit black soldiers. This revolutionary policy gave 180,000 free blacks and former slaves the opportunity to prove themselves on the battlefield as part of the United States Colored Troops. By the end of the war, 37,000 in their ranks had given their lives for the cause of freedom. In Forged in Battle, originally published in 1990, award-winning historian Joseph T. Glatthaar recreates the events that gave these troops and their 7,000 white officers justifiable pride in their contributions to the Union victory and hope of equality in the years to come. Unfortunately, as Glatthaar poignantly demonstrates, memory of the United States Colored Troops' heroic sacrifices soon faded behind the prejudice that would plague the armed forces for another century.” (Summary from book cover)

Golay, Michael.  "A Ruined Land:  the End of the Civil War."  New York:  Wiley.

Author
“In his latest, Golay chronicles the collapse of the Confederate army and the beginning of southern Reconstruction, once more revisiting this painful and tumultuous period by examining the lives of the newly emancipated and political, military, civilian, academic, and philanthropic figures both prominent and obscure. Through these cameos, he relates the old story of the defeated South's halting attempts to resurrect its bankrupt leadership and postwar agrarian economy, he also profiles its occupiers, a shaky coalition of rigid abolitionist missionaries, hardened Federal soldiers, disillusioned black troops, Yankee speculators, and other assorted opportunists. Golay's final chapter follows the post-Reconstruction lives and careers of his principal characters.” (Abstract adapted from a review by John Carver Edwards, published in the Library Journal 124, no. 16 (Oct. 1999):  109.)

Linderman, Gerald F.  "Embattled Courage:  the Experience of Combat in the American Civil War."  New York:  Free Press, 1987.

Professor of History at the University of Michigan
“Linderman, history professor at the University of Michigan, describes the unreasonably high standards of morality prevalent in the nation at the start of the Civil War, citing for example a letter from General Custer assuring his wife that he has ``not uttered a single oath, nor blasphemed, even in thought.'' According to Linderman, it was assumed on both sides that ``the application of the moral values to the struggle would determine both the forms and the result of the war.'' By 1865 those soldiers who survived had learned otherwise. In this deep inquiry into the nature of courage (and cowardice) as defined by soldiers and civilians North and South, the author traces the breakdown of traditional values, the changing behavior of the soldiers and the ``reconceptualization'' of the war by veterans in their later years. Drawing on letters and memoirs, he reveals the common tendency of soldiers who became disillusioned during the fighting to experience an amazing reversion in postwar years to the blind idealism with which they originally went to war.”
(Abstract adapted from a review Publisher’s Weekly)

Marten, James Alan.  "The Children’s Civil War."  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Professor of History at Marquette University
“This book deals with an area of the Civil War that hasn't been written about--the children who lived through it. Drawing on diaries, newspaper accounts, and personal letters, Marten offers a detailed look with interesting insights at how children lived through the Civil War. He examines the childhoods of Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington, and others to show the diverse ways that children coped with the loss of relatives and the hardships endured. Marten deals only with children on the home front; older children who joined the army are not covered.” (Abstract adapted from a review by Mark Ellis, published in the Library Journal 123, no. 13 (Aug. 1998):  112.)

McPherson, James M.  "Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution."  New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Professor of History at Princeton University
“In seven thoughtful essays the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom examines Lincoln's role in the transformation wrought by the Civil War--the liberation of four million slaves, the overthrow of the social and political order of the South. McPherson calls the 16th president a conservative revolutionary whose goal was to conserve the Union as the revolutionary heritage of the founding fathers. He addresses at length a subject oddly overlooked by historians and Civl War scholars: Lincoln as strategist and war leader. McPherson flatly states that he was responsible for the unconditional Union victory. Lincoln's superb leadership as president, commander-in-chief and head of the Republican party, the author concludes, determined the pace of the ``second American revolution'' and ensured its success. These scholarly essays convey the enduring significance of Lincoln's words and ideas as he grappled with issues which, as McPherson points out, will never become obsolete: the meaning of freedom, the limits of government power and individual liberty in time of crisis and the problems of wartime leadership.”  (Summary adapted from a review published in Publisher’s Weekly)

McPherson, James M.  "Battle Cry of Freedom:  the Civil War Era."  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1988.

Professor of History at Princeton University
“James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War--the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry--and then moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself--the battles, the strategic maneuvering on both sides, the politics, and the personalities. Particularly notable are McPherson's new views on such matters as the slavery expansion issue in the 1850s, the origins of the Republican Party, the causes of secession, internal dissent and anti-war opposition in the North and the South, and the reasons for the Union's victory.The book's title refers to the sentiments that informed both the Northern and Southern views of the conflict: the South seceded in the name of that freedom of self-determination and self-government for which their fathers had fought in 1776, while the North stood fast in defense of the Union founded by those fathers as the bulwark of American liberty. Eventually, the North had to grapple with the underlying cause of the war--slavery--and adopt a policy of emancipation as a second war aim. This "new birth of freedom," as Lincoln called it, constitutes the proudest legacy of America's bloodiest conflict.”  (Summary from book cover)

Morrison, Michael A.  "Slavery and the American West:  the Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War."  Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Associate Professor of History at Purdue University
“Michael Morrison offers a comprehensive study of how slavery and territorial expansion intersected as causes of the Civil War. Specifically, he argues that the common heritage of the American Revolution bound Americans together until disputes over the extension of slavery into the territories led northerners and southerners to increasingly divergent understandings of the Revolution's legacy.  Manifest Destiny promised the literal enlargement of freedom through the extension of American institutions all the way to the Pacific. At each step -- from John Tyler's attempt to annex Texas in 1844, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the opening shots of the Civil War-the issue of slavery had to be confronted. Morrison shows that the Revolution was the common prism through which northerners and southerners viewed these events and that the factor that ultimately made consensus impossible was slavery itself. By 1861, no nationally accepted solution to the dilemma of slavery in the territories had emerged, no political party existed as a national entity, and politicians from both North and South had come to believe that those on the other side had subverted the American political tradition.” (Summary from book cover)

Trudeau, Noah Andre.  "Like Men of War:  Black Troops in the Civil War," 1862-1865.  Boston:  Little, Brown and Co., 1998.

Producer of program for the National Public Radio
“In this unprecedented work of history, now in paperback, one of America's leading Civil War historians draws from nineteenth-century newspapers, letter, & soldiers' diaries to recreate the experiences of African-American troops in the Civil War. The authors richly textured narrative immerses us, battle by battle, in stories of the more than 175,000 black soldiers whose contributions have long been ignored or forgotten. More than a military history, Like Men of War is the stirring saga of people whose answer to slavery was a fierce determination to claim their full rights as citizens by force of arms.” (Summary from book cover)

Articles
Brigance, Linda Czuba.  “Ballots and Bullets:  Adapting Women’s Rights Arguments to the Conditions of War.”  Women & Language 28, no. 1 (Spring 2005):  1-8.

Associate Professor of Communication studies at the State University of New York, Fredonia
“Wartime presents extraordinary challenges for women's rights advocates, because political dissent is often interpreted as an unpatriotic act During the U.S. Civil War, many women redirected their efforts toward support of the war, because of the belief that their loyalty would be rewarded with suffrage. As this examination of the wartime rhetoric of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony explains, the two women's rights leaders continued to focus on their campaign for women's equality. By recognizing that the circumstances of war offered a unique rhetorical moment in the nation's history and creating strategies that took advantage of those circumstances, they kept the movement alive during the war and ensured its growth after the war when the post-war amendments failed to grant women suffrage.” (Abstract from author)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Egnal, Marc.  “Rethinking the Secession of the Lower South:  The Clash of Two Groups.”  Civil War History 50, no. 3 (Sept. 2004):  261-291.

Professor of History at York University, Canada
“Discusses the secession of the lower southern U.S. states during the U.S. civil war. Weak connection between slaveholding and disunion in lower South; Analysis of votes for secession conventions in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana; Nature of division between pro-Union and pro-north groups.” (Abstract from Inspire)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Faust, Drew Gilpin.  “We Should Grow Too Fond of It:  Why We Love the Civil War.”  Civil War History 50, no. 4 (Dec. 2004):  368-84.

Professor of History at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University
“Focuses on the debate over the famous quote of General Robert E. Lee in the Battle of Fredericksburg during the American Civil War. Morbid curiosities of civilians in the aftermath of the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg; Reason for the passion of historians in writing more on Civil War than any other events in the history of the U.S.; Solutions to international disputes.” (Abstract from Inspire)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Grant, Susan-Mary.  “Patriot Graves:  American National Identity and the Civil War Dead.” American Nineteenth Century History 5, no. 3 (Fall 2004):  74-101.

Reader in American history at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
“The Civil War was America's defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape - literal and figurative - of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer-term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial - indeed, the crucial - component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill-prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.” (Abstract from author)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Harrison, Kimberly.  “Rhetorical Rehearsals:  the Construction of Ethos in Confederate Women’s Civil War Diaries.”  Rhetoric Review 22, no. 3 (2003):  243-64.

Professor of English at the Florida International University
“This essay argues for the value of Confederate women's Civil War diaries to rhetorical history. As women faced the dangers and deprivations of war, they turned to their diaries to respond, using personal writing to rehearse and construct an effective ethos. By practicing "self-rhetorics," diarists prepared themselves to speak and act effectively in the contexts of war. One woman's diary, that of Priscilla "Mittie" Bond, serves as a case study.”  (Abstract from author)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Moseley, Caroline.  “Irrepressible Conflict:  Differences Between Northern and Southern
    Songs of the Civil War.”  Journal of Popular Culture 25, no. 2 (Fall 1991):  45-57.

Writer and Editor for the Office of Communications/Publications at Princeton University
“This article discusses the differences between Northern and Southern songs of the American Civil War. Perceptions of regional distinctiveness, North and South, fostered mutual antagonism and hastened the American Civil War.  The proper object of the investigation is the songs sung by Americans of the 1860s. The writing and publishing of music was not only an expression of patriotism. It was a business. The music business, like all businesses, was much more highly developed in the North. Most songs in the South are republications of songs originally published in the North. Many popular songs of the Civil War period were sung by blacks as well as whites.  Southern patriotic songs are heavy with the rhetoric of chivalry and feudalism, with praise for southern noblemen and disdain for the vandal hordes of the north. Northern songs also employed the rhetoric of chivalry but sarcastically. Differences in content and rhetoric between the Northern and Southern popular songs were emotionally very significant to the participants, doubtless sustaining each side in the irrepressible conflict.” (Abstract adapted from Inspire)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Ross-Bryant, Lynn.  “Sacred Sites:  Nature and Nation in the U.S. National Parks.”  Religion & American Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2005):  31-63.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder
“The U.S. National Parks, which first developed as the nation fragmented during the civil war, have played a central role in the unifying discourse of America. The parks are able to serve this role because of the close alliance between nature and nation in U.S. discourse. Nature "set apart" in the parks becomes the embodiment of an archetypal America, which is the ever-pristine source of the greatness of the nation and the people. As such, it serves as a sacred site and a unifying symbol in U.S. American culture. By approaching the parks as pilgrimage sites, we can examine the American values that have been embodied in them. Using a model that assumes the heterogeneity of any religio-cultural event, we can see the often conflicting values both in the spiritual, scientific, national and economic discourses that make up the parks and in the embodiment of those discourses in the physical developments in the parks. Central to both is the paradoxical ideal behind the parks: to preserve wilderness. The goal of the essay is two-fold: 1) as part of the comparative study of religions, to suggest the usefulness of a heterogeneous, spatialized model for analyzing sacred places and to apply the model to the study of American culture in order to understand more about how the embodiment of nature and nation in the National Parks has worked as a unifying symbol while at the same time disclosing contested and conflicting values in American society, and 2) to show how the meanings surrounding this symbol are being transformed today.” (Abstract from author)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Schwalm, Leslie A.  “Overrun with Free Negroes:  Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest.”  Civil War History  50, no. 2 (June 2004):  145-75.

Professor of History at the University of Iowa
“The article focuses on the emancipation and wartime migration in the upper Midwestern U.S. Scholars have focused the study of African American emancipation on policies debated in the U.S.'s capital and the progression of slavery's destruction in the Confederate South and the slave-holding Border States, but the varied and conflicting midwestern responses to wartime emancipation and black migration suggest that the implications and consequences of emancipation were also confronted outside the South. By the eve of the Civil War, public debate over the place of African Americans in the nation had a long history, expressed most cynically by the colonization and emigration movements.”  (Abstract from Inspire)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Winders, Jamie.  “Imperfectly Imperial:  Northern Travel Writers in the Postbellum U.S. South, 1865-1880.”  Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 2 (June 2005):  391-411.

Professor of Geography at Syracuse University
“Travel accounts of the Reconstruction U.S. South (1865–1880) played a formative role in the process of determining where the region fit within the nation-state after the Civil War. Postbellum travel narratives by northern men and women, in particular, dealt with the South's contradictory placement as both an occupied territory of the North/nation and part of the national body itself through a discourse of imperialism that translated a North-South regional binary into a colonizer-colonized distinction and framed the South as an imperial holding of the U.S. This article uses postcolonial studies and postcolonial geographies of North America to examine three textual themes that sustained this imperial framing of the South within northern travel narratives: discourses of civilization, descriptions of nature, and discussions of whiteness. The first two themes bolstered northern travelers' positioning of the South as an imperial holding, although gender contoured how northern travelers participated in a civilizing mission directed toward newly emancipated African Americans and how easily these travelers assumed the role of imperial explorer in rural and marginal southern sites. By contrast, white rural poverty in the postbellum South, through its simultaneous racial similarity to and class difference from white northern travelers, problematized a clean separation of North from South and highlighted the imperfections and contradictions of the postbellum South as an imperial holding of the North/nation. This article argues for more critical attention to the production of southern difference in the mid-nineteenth century and the postbellum South's place in relation to future American imperial projects.” (Abstract from author)
Access:  This article is available online through Inspire:

Sources:

Indiana Historical Society
http://www.indianahistory.org

Indiana State Library
http:// www.statelib.lib.in.us

National Archives
http:// www.nara.gov

Civil War at Smithsonian
http://www.civilwar.si.edu/home.html

Library of Congress- “American Memory”
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html