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...

Nothing can be more unlike The Pretentious Young Ladies or Sganarelle than Molière's Don Garcia of Navarre. The Théâtre du Palais-Royal had opened on the 20th January, 1661, with The Love-Tiff and Sganarelle, but as the young wife of Louis XIV., Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV., King of Spain, had only lately arrived, and as a taste for the Spanish drama appeared to spring up anew in France, Molière thought perhaps that a heroic comedy in that style might meet with some success, the m...

"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...

America's Founding Fathers feared that a standing army would be a permanent political danger, yet the U.S. military has in the 250 years since become a bulwark of democracy. Kori Schake explains why in this compelling history of civil-military relations from independence to the challenges of the present.The book begins with General Washington's vital foundational example of subordination to elected leaders during the Revolutionary War. Schake recounts numerous instances in the foll...

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...

In The American Military Tradition historians John M. Carroll and Colin F. Baxter gather an esteemed group of military historians to explore the pivotal issues and themes in American warfare from the Colonial era to the present conflict in Iraq.From the reliance on militia and the Minutemen of the American Revolution to the all-volunteer specialized troops of today, these twelve essays analyze the continuities and changes in the conduct of war over the pas...