A Kingdom Divided uncovers how evangelical Christians in the border states influenced debates about slavery, morality, and politics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Using little-studied events and surprising incidents from the region, April E. Holm argues that evangelicals on the border powerfully shaped the regional structure of American religion in the Civil War era.

In the decades before the Civil War, the three largest evangelical denominations diverged sharply over the sinfulness of slavery. This division generated tremendous local conflict in the border region, where...

The Civil War era marked the dawn of American wars of military occupation, inaugurating a tradition that persisted through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that continues to the present. In the Wake of War traces how volunteer and even professional soldiers found themselves tasked with the unprecedented project of wartime and peacetime military occupation, initiating a national debate about the changing nature of American military practice that continued into Reconstruction.

In the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, citizen-soldiers confronted the...

What did citizenship mean to Americans during the Civil War? At its most simple, it was a legal status acquired through birth or naturalization, and a status that offered certain rights in exchange for specific obligations. Yet throughout the Civil War era, the deeper meanings of citizenship were in flux. The very boundaries of the citizenry were unclear. Americans also disagreed over the specific nature of citizens' rights and obligations: whether political privileges were most important, or economic opportunity, or cultural belonging, or perhaps all three. Together, the contributors to...