Holmes's wartime letters and diary entries have attracted students of war as well as biographers of Holmes as rare glimpses into the mind and heart of a soldier who withstood the great slaughter.

This striking portrait of Abraham Lincoln found in this book is drawn entirely from the writing of his contemporaries and extends from his political beginnings in Springfield to his assassination. It reveals a more severely beleaguered, less godlike, and finally a richer Lincoln than has come through many of the biographies of Lincoln written at a distance after his death. To those who are familiar only with the various retouchedversions of Lincoln's life, Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait will be a welcome-if sometimes surprising-addition to the literature surrounding the man who is perhaps...

Three years ago, in celebration of the publication of The Union Preserved: A Guide to the Civil War Records in the New York State Archives, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, a program of the New York State Education Department, held a two-day symposium featuring research by leading scholars on New York's role in the Civil War. The symposium brought together a broad spectrum of attendees from the Lincoln Forum, Civil War re-enactors, Civil War Roundtable members, students, local historians, educators, and history enthusiasts. As the most populous state at the time of the Civil...

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and followed the progress of the companies and...

Each year, hundreds of scholars and other enthusiasts mark the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address by gathering together in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the Lincoln Forum. There, leading historians reinterpret and rediscover the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Now the best recent Lincoln Forum essays are available in one volume, offering important reexaminations of Lincoln as military leader, communicator, family man, and icon. The contributors include James M. McPherson, Craig L. Symonds, John F. Marszalek, Jean H. Baker, Hans L. Trefousse, J. Tracy Power, John C. Waugh, Gerald Prokopowicz, and...

Freedom, Union, and Power analyzes the beliefs of the Republican Party during the Civil War, how those beliefs changed, and what those changes foreshadowed for the future. The party's pre-war ideology of free soil, free labor, free menchanged with the Republican ascent to power in the White House. With Lincoln's election, Republicans faced something new-responsibility for the government. With responsibility came the need to wage a war for the survival of that government, the country, and the party. And with victory in the war came responsibility responsibility for saving the Union-by ending...

Francis C. Barlow rose from lieutenant to general, suffered two serious wounds in combat, and played critical roles in such battles as Fair Oaks, Gettysburg (part of this battlefield is now named for him), and Spotsylvania. Barlow's war correspondence not only provide a rich description of his experiences in these actions but also offer insight into a civilian learning the realities of war as well as the burdens of command.Barlow was well connected with many eminent figures of his time, having spent part of his youth at Brook Farm, graduated in the Harvard College class of 1855, and had such...

Winner of the Avery O. Craven Prize of the Organization of American HistoriansAnother Civil War explores a tumultuous era of social change in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania. Because the Union Army depended on anthracite to fuel steam-powered factories, locomotives, and battle ships, coal miners in Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Carbon Counties played a vital role in the Northern war effort. However, that role was complicated by a history of ethnic, political, and class conflicts: after years of struggle in an unsafe and unstable industry, miners expected to use their wartime economic power...

Invaluable.many insights into the life and thought of the nineteenth century.. Fisher's] comments are stimulating, often barbed..the narrative is smooth-flowing and fascinating.-American Historical ReviewAn important literary event..an invaluable historical source. Unexcelled.-Pennsylvania HistoryFisher was an astute and acerbic commentator on politics and society in Philadelphia, Washington, and the country as a whole during the Civil War. While legal, historical, and literary scholars will mine this diary for its penetrating insights, lovers of history will delight in Fisher's ability to...