Books on the American Civil War Era

Books on the American Civil War Era
Author: Walter Westcote
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781611212709

Tens of thousands of books have been published on the Civil War. In an effort to list some of most important titles, in 1997 the University of Illinois Press published The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography, by David J. Eicher. This well-received reference work includes books published through mid-1995. As anyone who has studied this era knows, a vast number of significant books have been published since that time--hence the need for this updated bibliography. Walter Westcote's Books on the American Civil War Era: A Critical Bibliography includes nearly 3,000 books, most of which have been published since the appearance of Eicher's groundbreaking 1997 study. Topics are wide-ranging and organized into easy-to-use categories, so readers can find exactly what they are seeking. Organizational categories include battles and campaigns (all theaters, including naval actions), Confederate and Union memoirs and biographies, general works on a vast array of topics, state and local studies, and unit histories. Readers will also be pleased to find a list of classic studies published before 1995, as well as more than 200 books that represent a continuation of a series begun prior to that time, and the completion of the Supplement to the Records of the War of the Rebellion, which consisted of twenty volumes in 1995 but now exceeds 100. Each account lists the author or editor, title, date of original publication (and reprint, if any), publisher, page count, and a short summary of its contents.

General Grant and the Verdict of History

General Grant and the Verdict of History
Author: Frank P Varney
Publisher: Savas Beatie
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1611215544

General Ulysses S. Grant is best remembered today as a war-winning general, and he certainly deserves credit for his efforts on behalf of the Union. But has he received too much credit at the expense of other men? Have others who fought the war with him suffered unfairly at his hands? General Grant and the Verdict of History: Memoir, Memory, and the Civil War explores these issues. Professor Frank P. Varney examines Grant’s relationship with three noted Civil War generals: the brash and uncompromising “Fighting Joe” Hooker; George H. Thomas, the stellar commander who earned the sobriquet “Rock of Chickamauga”; and Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who served honorably and well in every major action of the Army of the Potomac before being relieved less than two weeks before Appomattox, and only after he had played a prominent part in the major Union victory at Five Forks. In his earlier book General Grant and the Rewriting of History, Dr. Varney studied the tempestuous relationship between Grant and Union General William S. Rosecrans. During the war, Rosecrans was considered by many of his contemporaries to be on par with Grant himself; today, he is largely forgotten. Rosecrans’s star dimmed, argues Varney, because Grant orchestrated the effort. Unbeknownst to most students of the war, Grant used his official reports, interviews with the press, and his memoirs to influence how future generations would remember the war and his part in it. Aided greatly by his two terms as president, by the clarity and eloquence of his memoirs, and in particular by the dramatic backdrop against which those memoirs were written, our historical memory has been influenced to a degree greater than many realize. It is beyond time to return to the original sources—the letters, journals, reports, and memoirs of other witnesses and the transcripts of courts-martial— to examine Grant’s story from a fresh perspective. The results are enlightening and more than a little disturbing.

This Republic of Suffering

This Republic of Suffering
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2009-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0375703837

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Terrible Swift Sword

Terrible Swift Sword
Author: Bruce Catton
Publisher: Doubleday
Total Pages: 639
Release: 2013-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307833062

The second episode in this award-winning trilogy impressively shows how the Union and Confederacy, slowly and inexorably, reconciled themselves to an all-out war—an epic struggle for freedom. In Terrible Swift Sword, Bruce Catton tells the story of the Civil War as never before—of two turning points which changed the scope and meaning of the war. First, he describes how the war slowly but steadily got out of control. This would not be the neat, short, “limited” war both sides had envisioned. And then the author reveals how the sweeping force of all-out conflict changed the war’s purpose, in turning it into a war for human freedom. It was not initially a war against slavery. Instead, this was, Mr. Lincoln kept insisting, a fight to reunite the United States. At first, it was not even much of a fight. Cautious generals; inexperienced, incompetent, or jealous administrators; shortages of good people and supplies; excess of both gloom and optimism, kept each side from swinging into decisive action. As the buildup began, there were maddening delays. The earliest engagements were halting and inconclusive. After these first tests at arms, reputations began to crumble. Buell, Halleck, Beauregard Albert Sidney Johnston. Failed to drive ahead—for reasons good and bad. General McClellan (impaled in these pages on the arrogant words of his letters) captured more imaginations than enemies, and continued to accept serious over estimates of Confederate strength while becoming more and more fatally estranged from his own government.

Civil War America, 1850 To 1875

Civil War America, 1850 To 1875
Author: Richard F. Selcer
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: Almanacs, American
ISBN: 1438107978

Features essays, statistical data, period photographs, maps, and documents.

The American Yawp

The American Yawp
Author: Joseph L. Locke
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 670
Release: 2019-01-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503608131

"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass The American Yawp is a free, online, collaboratively built American history textbook. Over 300 historians joined together to create the book they wanted for their own students—an accessible, synthetic narrative that reflects the best of recent historical scholarship and provides a jumping-off point for discussions in the U.S. history classroom and beyond. Long before Whitman and long after, Americans have sung something collectively amid the deafening roar of their many individual voices. The Yawp highlights the dynamism and conflict inherent in the history of the United States, while also looking for the common threads that help us make sense of the past. Without losing sight of politics and power, The American Yawp incorporates transnational perspectives, integrates diverse voices, recovers narratives of resistance, and explores the complex process of cultural creation. It looks for America in crowded slave cabins, bustling markets, congested tenements, and marbled halls. It navigates between maternity wards, prisons, streets, bars, and boardrooms. The fully peer-reviewed edition of The American Yawp will be available in two print volumes designed for the U.S. history survey. Volume I begins with the indigenous people who called the Americas home before chronicling the collision of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans.The American Yawp traces the development of colonial society in the context of the larger Atlantic World and investigates the origins and ruptures of slavery, the American Revolution, and the new nation's development and rebirth through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Rather than asserting a fixed narrative of American progress, The American Yawp gives students a starting point for asking their own questions about how the past informs the problems and opportunities that we confront today.

Lee and His Generals

Lee and His Generals
Author: Lawrence Lee Hewitt
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2012-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1572338865

A legendary professor at Louisiana State University, T. Harry Williams not only produced such acclaimed works as Lincoln and the Radicals, Lincoln and His Generals, and a biography of Huey Long that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but he also mentored generations of students who became distinguished historians in their own right. In this collection, ten of those former students, along with one author greatly inspired by Williams’s example, offer incisive essays that honor both Williams and his career-long dedication to sound, imaginative scholarship and broad historical inquiry. The opening and closing essays, fittingly enough, deal with Williams himself: a biographical sketch by Frank J. Wetta and a piece by Roger Spiller that place Williams in larger historical perspective among writers on Civil War generalship. The bulk of the book focuses on Robert E. Lee and a number of the commanders who served under him, starting with Charles Roland’s seminal article “The Generalship of Robert E. Lee,” the only one in the collection that has been previously published. Among the essays that follow Roland’s are contributions by Brian Holden Reid on the ebb and flow of Lee’s reputation, George C. Rable on Stonewall Jackson’s deep religious commitment, A. Wilson Greene on P. G. T. Beauregard’s role in the Petersburg Campaign, and William L. Richter on James Longstreet as postwar pariah. Together these gifted historians raise a host of penetrating and original questions about how we are to understand America’s defining conflict in our own time—just as T. Harry Williams did in his. And by encompassing such varied subjects as military history, religion, and historiography, Lee and His Generals demonstrates once more what a fertile field Civil War scholarship remains. Lawrence Lee Hewitt is professor of history emeritus at Southeastern Louisiana University. Most recently, he and Arthur W. Bergeron, now deceased, coedited three volumes of essays under the collective title Confederate Generals in the Western Theater. Thomas E. Schott served for many years as a historian for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command. He is the author of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography, which won both the Society of American Historians Award and the Jefferson Davis Award.

This Hallowed Ground

This Hallowed Ground
Author: Bruce Catton
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1998
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781853266966

This history of the American Civil War chronicles the entire war to preserve the Union - from the Northern point of view, but in terms of the men from both sides who lived and died in glory on the fields.

American History, Volume 2

American History, Volume 2
Author: Thomas S. Kidd
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1433644444

American History volume 2 gives a wide overview of America’s history from the end of the Civil War era, to the political and cultural struggles of contemporary times. Thomas S. Kidd employs lessons learned from his own scholarly expertise and history classes to weave together a compelling narrative of the defeats and triumphs that have defined the American national experience. Unlike many textbooks of modern American history, religion and faith remain central aspects of the book’s coverage, through present-day America. It gives detailed treatment of episodes such as America’s military conflicts, the Civil Rights movement, and the culture wars of the past half-century. Professor Kidd also considers the development of America’s obsession with entertainment, from the rise of the first movies, to the social media age. American History volume 2 will help students wrestle with the political and cultural changes that have dramatically transformed contemporary American life