Using widely scattered and previously unknown primary sources, Parrish’s biography of Confederate general Richard Taylor presents him as one of the Civil War’s most brilliant generals, eliciting strong performances from his troops in the face of manifold obstacles in three theaters of action.

Henry Eustace McCulloch provides the first comprehensive account of a pivotal nineteenth-century military leader and politician from Texas. In his military career, Henry McCulloch served with his brother Ben in one of the first Texas Ranger companies after the Texas Revolution of 1836, defended settlers during the Great Comanche Raid of 1840, and helped to defeat Mexican forces that reoccupied San Antonio in 1842. He also served as a captain in the United States Army during the Me...

While historians have acknowledged that the issues of race, slavery, and emancipation were not unique to the American Civil War, they have less frequently recognized the conflict’s similarities to other global events. As renowned historian Carl Degler pointed out, the Civil War was “one among many” such conflicts during the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the Civil War’s place in world history requires placing it within a global context of other mid-nineteenth-century political, soci...

Military uniforms, badges, flags, and other material objects have been used to represent the identity of Americans throughout history. In The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox examines the material culture of America’s bloodiest conflict, offering a deeper understanding of the war and its commemoration.Cox’s analysis traces the influence of sewn materials throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction as markers of power and authority for both the Union and the Conf...

Winner of the Wiley-Silver PrizeCecily N. Zander’s The Army under Fire is a pathbreaking study focusing on the fierce political debates over the size and use of military forces in the United States during the Civil War era. It examines how prominent political figures interacted with the professional army and how those same leaders misunderstood the value of regular soldiers fighting to reunify the fractured nation.

Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Center's Lincoln PrizeIPPY Gold Medal for Southern Non-fictionThe Devil’s Own Purgatory is the first complete history of the Union navy’s Mississippi Squadron, a fleet that prowled the Mississippi River and its tributaries during the American Civil War. The squadron battered Confederate forts, participated in combined operations with the army, obliterated the Confederate fleet, protected Union supply ...

Timothy D. Grundmeier’s Lutheranism and American Culture examines the transformation of the nation’s third-largest Protestant denomination over the course of the nineteenth century. In the antebellum era, leading voices within the church believed that the best way to become American was by modifying certain historic doctrines deemed too Catholic and cooperating with Anglo-evangelicals in revivalism and social reform. However, by the mid-1870s, most Lutherans had rejected this view...

David T. Ballantyne’s Fractured Freedoms is a riveting history of central Louisiana from the 1860s to the 1890s, focusing on majority-Black Rapides Parish during Reconstruction. Using the region as a case study, Ballantyne reveals what is, in part, a rural Reconstruction success story, emphasizing the resilience of Black politics and the persistence of significant divisions among white residents that allowed the Republican Party to gain and maintain power there. It was only with t...

Charles Cowlam’s career as a convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, and con artist spanned the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age. His life touched many of the most prominent figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. One contemporary newspaper reported that Cowlam “has as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.” He was a chameleon in a world of strangers, and scholars have overlooked him due to hi...

Carin Peller-Semmens’s Unreconstructed grapples with the longstanding, systemic effects of white supremacist brutality in northwest Louisiana, highlighting the constancy of racial subjugation in one of the most violent areas of the South. Tracing the commitment of the region’s white slaveholders to racial violence from antebellum enslavement through to Reconstruction, Peller-Semmens unearths the durable ideology of mastery in the Red River region. She demonstrates that white supre...

Frank J. Wetta and Martin A. Novelli’s Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film investigates how depictions of women in Hollywood motion pictures helped forge the myth of Lincoln. Exploring female characters’ backstories, the political and cultural climate in which the films appeared, and the contest between the moviemakers’ imaginations and the varieties of historical truth, Wetta and Novelli place the women in Lincoln’s life at the center of the study, including his mother, Nancy Hanks...

Long overshadowed by the American Civil War, the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) has received significantly less attention from historians partly because of its questionable origin and controversial outcome. Rather than treat the conflict with a form of historical amnesia, the contributors to this volume argue that the Mexican-American War was a formative experience for the more than three hundred future Civil War generals who served in it as lower-grade officers. The Mexican War was the ...