"In her admirable biography of Mary Chesnut, Elisabeth Muhlenfeld has American literature as well as American history in her debt." -- C. Vann Woodward

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823--1886) is known today for her excellent firsthand account of life in the Confederate States of America. A Diary from Dixie (republished in 1981 as Mary Chesnut's Civil War)is far more than a simple diary, however, for Mrs. Chesnut's drawing room was a social center for many of the most prominent political and military figures in the Confederacy. Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's expert biography utilizes Mrs....

Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina s Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands.

"Rehearsal for Reconstruction," winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose s chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose...

C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern History remains one of the essential history texts of our time. In it Woodward brilliantly addresses the interrelated themes of southern identity, southern distinctiveness, and the strains of irony that characterize much of the South's historical experience. First published in 1960, the book quickly became a touchstone for generations of students. This updated third edition contains a chapter, "Look Away, Look Away," in which Woodward finds a plethora of additional ironies in the South's experience. It also includes previously uncollected...