In this in-depth and detailed history, Timothy J. Williams reveals that antebellum southern higher education did more than train future secessionists and proslavery ideologues. It also fostered a growing world of intellectualism flexible enough to marry the era's middle-class value system to the honor-bound worldview of the southern gentry. By focusing on the students' perspective and drawing from a rich trove of their letters, diaries, essays, speeches, and memoirs, Williams narrates the under examined story of education and manhood at the University of North Carolina, the nation's first...

We are in Algeria, in a small, nameless village, a battered village. The war, stretching from the mountains to the sea, cannot alter the beauty of land and sky, the light falling on the graveyard, the silence of a proud and impoverished people. Ceaselessly, on foot and on horseback, the narrator travels about a land to which he is rapidly becoming attached. During his excursions through a landscape that stimulates and fascinates him, he gives way to an anguished meditation on fate, questioning himself about good and evil, the degradation and corruption of men, the absurdity of war. Day by...

Presents the memoir of a captured Confederate soldier in northern Virginia and the letters he exchanged with his fiancee during the Civil War. Wash Nelson and Mollie Scollay's letters, as well as Nelson's own manuscript memoir, provide rare insight into a world of intimacy, despair, loss, and reunion in the Civil War South.

Presents the memoir of a captured Confederate soldier in northern Virginia and the letters he exchanged with his fiancee during the Civil War. Wash Nelson and Mollie Scollay's letters, as well as Nelson's own manuscript memoir, provide rare insight into a world of intimacy, despair, loss, and reunion in the Civil War South.