From the time of the American Revolution, most junior officers in the American military attained their positions through election by the volunteer soldiers in their company, a tradition that reflected commitment to democracy even in times of war. By the outset of the Civil War, citizen-officers had fallen under sharp criticism from career military leaders who decried their lack of discipline and efficiency in battle. Andrew S. Bledsoe's Citizen Officers explores the role of the volunteer officer corps during the Civil War and the unique leadership challenges they faced when military...

In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager probes the struggles of aggrieved spouses shedding light on the nature of marriage and violence in the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. Analyzing over 1,500 divorce records that reveal intimate details of marriages in conflict in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840--1860, Sager offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of ordinary Americans shaken by accusations of cruelty.

At a time when the standard for an ideal marriage held that both partners adequately perform their respective duties, hostility...

During the American Civil War the western Trans-Mississippi frontier was host to harsh environmental conditions, irregular warfare, and intense racial tensions that created extraordinarily difficult conditions for both combatants and civilians. Matthew M. Stith's Extreme Civil War focuses on Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory to examine the physical and cultural frontiers that challenged Confederate and Union forces alike. A disturbing narrative emerges where conflict indiscriminately beset troops and families in a region that continually verged on social and political...

In Confederate Political Economy, Michael Bonner suggests that the Confederate nation was an expedient corporatist state -- a society that required all sectors of the economy to work for the national interest, as defined by a partnership of industrial leaders and a dominant government. As Bonner shows, the characteristics of the Confederate States' political economy included modern organizational methods that mirrored the economic landscape of other late nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century corporatist governments.

Southern leaders, Bonner argues, were slave-owning...

In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners both slaveholders and nonslaveholders willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery s westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they...

Between 1817 and 1898, New York City evolved from a vital Atlantic port of trade to the center of American commerce and culture. With this rapid commercial growth and cultural development, New York came to epitomize a nineteenth-century metropolis. Although this important urban transformation is well documented, the critical role of select Union soldiers turned New York engineers has, until now, remained largely unexplored. In "Designing Gotham," Jon Scott Logel examines the fascinating careers of George S. Greene, Egbert L. Viele, John Newton, Henry Warner Slocum, and Fitz John Porter,...

During the Civil War, Vicksburg, Mississippi, assumed almost mythic importance in the minds of Americans: northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians. While many historians have chronicled the fall of Vicksburg, Bradley R. Clampitt is the first to offer a comprehensive examination of life in Vicksburg after its capture by the United States military.

Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination of the topic to date, the book sharply focuses on the "borderland" between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed kinship and...

Throughout the Civil War, irregular warfare including the use of hit-and-run assaults, ambushes, and raiding tactics thrived in localized guerrilla fights within the Border States and the Confederate South. The Guerrilla Hunters offers a comprehensive overview of the tactics, motives, and actors in these conflicts, from the Confederate-authorized Partisan Rangers, a military force directed to spy on, harass, and steal from Union forces, to men like John Gatewood, who deserted the Confederate army in favor of targeting Tennessee civilians believed to be in sympathy with the...

During the four years of the American Civil War, over 400,000 soldiers one in every seven who served in the Union and Confederate armies became prisoners of war. In northern and southern prisons alike, inmates suffered horrific treatment. Even healthy young soldiers often sickened and died within weeks of entering the stockades. In all, nearly 56,000 prisoners succumbed to overcrowding, exposure, poor sanitation, inadequate medical care, and starvation. Historians have generally blamed prison conditions and mortality rates on factors beyond the control of Union and Confederate command, but...