Who actually steers a multi-billion-dollar cargo ship into a crowded, treacherous commercial port? Surprisingly, it is almost never the captain. Instead, the vessel's command is temporarily surrendered to a highly specialized, intensely localized professional known as a maritime pilot. Because shifting sandbars, hidden wrecks, and complex tidal currents are too unpredictable for standard GPS, ports require physical human intervention. This reliance has birthed powerful, tightly knit pilot ...

Playing at War offers an innovative focus on Civil War video games as significant sites of memory creation, distortion, and evolution in popular culture. With fifteen essays by historians, the collection analyzes the emergence and popularity of video games that topically engage the period surrounding the American Civil War, from the earliest console games developed in the 1980s through the web-based games of the twenty-first century, including popular titles such as Red Dead R...

"A fascinating collection of essays" by eminent historians exploring how we teach, remember, and confront the history and legacy of American slavery ( Booklist Online).In recent years, the culture wars have called into question the way America's history of slavery is depicted in books, films, television programs, historical sites, and museums. In the first attempt to examine the historiography of slavery, this unique collection of essays looks at recent co...

The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first centuryThe Princeton Guide to Historical Research provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides rea...

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, scores of websites, articles, and organizations repeat claims that anywhere between 500 and 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans fought willingly as soldiers in the Confederate army. But as Kevin M. Levin argues in this carefully researched book, such claims would have shocked anyone who served in the army during the war itself. Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and othe...

"An important read for anyone trying to sort through the current social and political controversy over the question of how do we memorialize the Civil War." — Strategy PageDividing the nation for four years, the American Civil War resulted in 750,000 casualties and forever changed the country's destiny. The conflict continues to resonate in our collective memory, and U.S. economic, cultural, and social structures still suffer the aftershocks of the nation's...

In the seventy-three succinct essays gathered in The Enduring Civil War, celebrated historian Gary W. Gallagher highlights the complexity and richness of the war, from its origins to its memory, as topics for study, contemplation, and dispute. He places contemporary understanding of the Civil War, both academic and general, in conversation with testimony from those in the Union and the Confederacy who experienced and described it, investigating how mid-nineteenth-century perceptio...

"Outstanding essays" exploring how educated Northerners viewed, and discussed, the Civil War (Michael B. Ballard, Civil War News).With contributions from multiple historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the Civil War and implementing their vision of a victorious Union. Broadly defining "intellectuals" to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays add...

NOTHING IN AMERICAN HISTORY has ever equaled the death and destruction of the intense and bloody warfare of 1861-1865 between Americans. Given the size of the population at the time, that period is unmatched in the scale of military mobilization, in the destruction of property on our own soil, and in the casualties, not only of soldiers but of Southern civilians, black and white.For later generations, such a horror must have the comfort of a moral justification. We fall back on righ...

When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Gilpin Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women’s lives became vexed and uncertain.In this UNC Press Short, excerpted fr...

How did Gettysburg become the most famous battle of the American Civil War and one of the most consequential in world history? Why is the most visited battlefield, the place where veterans came in the greatest numbers, where Presidents pay homage, and millions of families have vacationed? What was it about this three-day struggle in July 1863 in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania that made it seem the "turning point of the war", or the "high-water mark" of the Confederate rebellion? Get...

Civil War historians shed new light on the importance of guerrilla combat across the south in this "useful and fascinating work" ( Choice).Touching states from Virginia to New Mexico, guerrilla warfare played a significant yet underexamined role in the Civil War. Guerrilla fighters fought for both the Union and the Confederacy—as well as their own ethnic groups, tribes, or families. They were deadly forces that plundered, tortured, and terrorized those in t...