The Free State of Jones, Movie Edition: Mississippi's Longest Civil War

Submitted by FHMaster on Sat, 01/14/2017 - 23:53

"Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where they declared their loyalty to the U.S. government.

For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War

Submitted by FHMaster on Sat, 01/14/2017 - 20:18

"General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ?

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

Submitted by FHMaster on Fri, 01/13/2017 - 23:58

"In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.
 

The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America

Submitted by FHMaster on Mon, 01/09/2017 - 19:17

"The question at the heart of The Cousins’ Wars is this: How did Anglo-America evolve over a mere three hundred years from a small Tudor kingdom into a global community with such a hegemonic grip on the world today, while no other European power—Spain, France, Germany, or Russia—did? The answer to this, according to Phillips, lies in a close examination of three internecine English-speaking civil wars—the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War.

The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina

Submitted by FHMaster on Mon, 01/09/2017 - 19:13

"In this comprehensive analysis of politics and ideology in antebellum South Carolina, Manisha Sinha offers a provocative new look at the roots of southern separatism and the causes of the Civil War. Challenging works that portray secession as a fight for white liberty, she argues instead that it was a conservative, antidemocratic movement to protect and perpetuate racial slavery.

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

Submitted by FHMaster on Mon, 01/09/2017 - 14:48

"Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. "

Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War

Submitted by FHMaster on Mon, 01/09/2017 - 14:44

"In early 1864, as the Confederate Army of Tennessee licked its wounds after being routed at the Battle of Chattanooga, Major-General Patrick Cleburne (the "Stonewall of the West") proposed that "the most courageous of our slaves" be trained as soldiers and that "every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war" be freed.

The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War

Submitted by FHMaster on Mon, 01/09/2017 - 10:55

"When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he had broader aims than simply rallying a war-weary nation. Lincoln realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance—that all of Europe and Latin America was watching to see whether the United States, a beleaguered model of democracy, would indeed “perish from the earth.”

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

Submitted by FHMaster on Fri, 01/06/2017 - 20:25

"The Civil War was a major turning point in American religious thought, argues Mark A. Noll. Although Christian believers agreed with one another that the Bible was authoritative and that it should be interpreted through commonsense principles, there was rampant disagreement about what Scripture taught about slavery.