How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael’s sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience — the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of...

This collection of original essays reveals the richness and dynamism of contemporary scholarship on the Civil War era. Inspired by the lines of inquiry that animated the writings of the influential historian Gary W. Gallagher, this volume includes nine essays by leading scholars in the field who explore a broad range of themes and participants in the nation’s greatest conflict, from Indigenous communities navigating the dangerous shoals of the secession winter to Confederate guerrillas cau...

First published in 2009. From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems. Volume 1 includes a general introduction and the colonial period covering slavery and the law, slave resistance, religion and slavery; and Pro-Slavery, Anti-Slavery and the Revolutionary Impulse.

First published in 2009. From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems. Volume 3 includes the Antebellum Period from 1828 to 1859.

First published in 2009. From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems. Volume 4 includes the Civil War and Emancipation period from 1861 to 1866.

First published in 2009. From the founding of Jamestown to the American Civil War, slavery and abolition shaped American national, regional and racial identities. This four-volume reset edition draws together rare sources relating to American slavery systems. Volume 2 includes the Revolutionary and Early National Period and covers the Anti-Slavery Impulse and Reaction to It and the Slave Experience.

Between March 1863 and July 1865, Confederate newlyweds Brigadier General Gabriel C. Wharton and Anne Radford Wharton wrote 524 letters, and all survived, unknown until now. Separated by twenty years in age and differing opinions on myriad subjects, these educated and articulate Confederates wrote frankly and perceptively on their Civil War world. Sharing opinions on generals and politicians, the course of the war, the fate of the Confederacy, life at home, and their wavering loyalties, th...

“Truth is mighty & will eventually prevail”Political Correctness, Neo-Confederates, and Robert E. Leeby Peter S. CarmichaelWhy do we argue—and argue—so much about Robert E. Lee?“While northerners might appear comparatively apathetic about the memory of the Union cause, white southerners have been tenacious in searching for moral clarity in the past.”

Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter S. Carmichael looks closely at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia’s last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery. He finds them deeply engaged in the political, economic, and cultural forces of their time. Age, he concludes, created special concerns for young men who spent their formative years in the 1850s....

Despite the literary outpouring on the life of Robert E. Lee, the southern chieftain remains an enigma. The existing scholarship is so voluminous, complex, and contradictory that it is difficult to penetrate the inner Lee and appreciate him as a general. Peter S. Carmichael has assembled a formidable array of Civil War historians who rigorously return to Lee's own words and actions in interpreting the war in Virginia. This is the first collective volume to scrutinize specific aspects of th...

In May 1861, Virginian Thomas Henry Carter (1831–1908) raised an artillery battery and joined the Confederate army. Over the next four years, he rose steadily in rank from captain to colonel, placing him among the senior artillerists in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. During the war, Carter wrote more than 100 revealing letters to his wife, Susan, about his service. His interactions with prominent officers — including Lee, Jubal A. Early, John B. Gordon, Robert E. Rodes, and oth...

“It is well that war is so terrible,” Robert E. Lee reportedly said, “or we would grow too fond of it.” The essays collected here make the case that we have grown too fond of it, and therefore we must make the war terrible again. Taking a “freakonomics” approach to Civil War studies, each contributor uses a seemingly unusual story, incident, or phenomenon to cast new light on the nature of the war itself. Collectively the essays remind us that war is always about damage, even at i...