Beyond the battlefield: How race and gender redefined war, identity, and memory in Civil War America.Race and Gender at War is a collection of essays that illuminates ways that race and gender have persistently shaped the military history of the United States. Editors Lesley J. Gordon and Andrew J. Huebner showcase historians with varied research agendas in the field of “war and society,” a fertile area of inquiry that shares space (and often over...

**Using letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers to take us inside the minds of Civil War soldiers—black and white, Northern and Southern—as they fought and marched across a divided country, this unprecedented account is “an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery and the Civil War" (**The Philadelphia Inquirer).In this unprecedented account, Chandra Manning With stunning poise and narrative verve, Manning explores how the Union and Confe...

**WINNER OF THE NAU BOOK PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE GILDER LEHRMAN LINCOLN PRIZE • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 • One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace"Eye-opening, disturbing, moving and at times jaw-dropping . . . Once in a great while a book arrives that allows us to rediscover the strange inexhaustibility of th...

This book is a narrative history of the many dimensions of the War of 1812 - social, diplomatic, military and political - which places the war's origins and conduct in transatlantic perspective. The events of 1812–15 were shaped by the larger crisis of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. In synthesizing and reinterpreting scholarship on the war, Professor J. C. A. Stagg focuses on the war as a continental event, highlighting its centrality to Canadian nationalism and state development. The book...

"Cook makes clear the powerful ways that the reverberations of the Civil War still resonate within American political culture. A compelling story." —Joan Waugh, author of U. S. GrantWinner of the 2018 Book Prize in American Studies of the British Association of American StudiesAt a cost of at least 800,000 lives, the Civil War preserved the Union, aborted the breakaway Confederacy, and liberated a race of slaves. Civil War Memori...

More than 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 U.S. Civil War: A Very Short Introduction 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 pulsat...

The story of the black soldiers who helped save the Union, conquer the West, and build the nation.In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass promised African Americans that serving in the military offered a sure path to freedom. Once a black man became a soldier, Douglass declared, “there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” More than 180,000 black men heeded his c...

**A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024A masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.**In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. The Amer...

From the author of What This Cruel War Was Over, a vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States.Even before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, slaves recognized that their bondage was at the root of the war they knew was coming, and they began running to the Union army. By the war’s end, nearly half a million had taken refuge behind Union lines in improvised “contraband camp...

"Incisive and insightful. . . . As good a short history of the Southern war effort as we have." —T. Harry Williams, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln and His GeneralsEmory M. Thomas's critically acclaimed chronicle of the Confederacy remains widely recognized as the standard history of the South during the Civil War. Now with a new introduction by the author, The Confederate Nation presents a highly readable, highly personal portrait of the...

Winner, Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction Winner, Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies, New York Military Affairs Symposium Winner of the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize of the Austin Civil War Round Table Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy Best Books of 2014, Civil War Monitor 6 Civil War Books to Read Now, Diane Rehm Show, NPR Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House evokes a highly gratifying image in the popular mind -- it...

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...