Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - Civil War Period (1850-1877)

"To tell my own story is to tell that of my famous husband, General John A. Logan," explains Mary S. Logan in the preface to her autobiography.

Married to John A. Logan for thirty-one years, Mary Logan shared in her distinguished husband s career as a prosecutor in southern Illinois, as a Civil War general, and as a senator from Illinois. She observed firsthand the extraordinary events before, during, and after the Civil War, and she knew personally those world leaders who held the power to shape history. After the death of her husband, she maintained her influence in Washington, D.C....

On May 10, 1876, Ulysses S. Grant pulled a lever to start the mighty 1,400-horsepower Corliss Steam Engine, powering acres of machinery for the nation's Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Grant summed up a century of American progress by saying, "Whilst proud of what we have done, we regret that we have not done more. Our achievements have been great enough however to make it easy for our people to acknowledge superior merit wheresoever found."

That summer, Fourth of July celebrations coincided with early reports that Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and his Seventh Cavalry...

Within the American antislavery movement, abolitionists were distinct from others in the movement in advocating, on the basis of moral principle, the immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for black people. Instead of focusing on the "immediatists" as products of northern culture, as many previous historians have done, Stanley Harrold examines their involvement with antislavery action in the South--particularly in the region that bordered the free states. How, he asks, did antislavery action in the South help shape abolitionist beliefs and policies in the period leading up to...

When Slavery Was Called Freedom uncovers the cultural and ideological bonds linking the combatants in the Civil War era and boldly reinterprets the intellectual foundations of secession. John Patrick Daly dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was used in the Confederacy.

Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence...

Few American battles have been the object of as much discussion and popular fascination as the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Yet after more than a century, a great number of questions remain unanswered. Many are destined to remain so. No white man survived to tell the tale, Indian accounts are inconsistent, and contemporary reports are distorted by political considerations.

Charles K. Hofling, however, provides fresh insight to the events of June 1876 by exploring them from a unique perspective. Concluding that discussions of military tactics and strategy are not sufficient in...

The title of Blue-Tail Fly comes from an antebellum song commonly known as "Jimmy Crack Corn." The blue-tail fly is a supposedly insignificant creature that bites the horse that bucks and kills the master. In this collection, poet Vievee Francis gives voice to "outsiders"-from soldiers and common folk to leading political figures-who play the role of the blue-tail fly in the period of American history between the Mexican American War and the Civil War. Through a diverse range of styles, characters, and emotions, Francis's poems consider the demands of war, protest and resistance to it, and...

Raised in Alabama and married to a U.S. congressman, Virginia Tunstall Clay-Clopton always showed more interest in politics than in household duties. Her memoirs, covering the tumultuous period from 1853 to 1866, provide an insider's look at national and southern politics as she traveled with her husband, Clement Claiborne Clay, to Washington, D.C., and then on to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, where he served...

Raised in Alabama and married to a U.S. congressman, Virginia Tunstall Clay-Clopton always showed more interest in politics than in household duties. Her memoirs, covering the tumultuous period from 1853 to 1866, provide an insider's look at national and southern politics as she traveled with her husband, Clement Claiborne Clay, to Washington, D.C., and then on to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, where he...

"Chained to the Rock of Adversity" offers valuable insight into the lives of the Old South's free women of color, using personal letters and a diary to tell an extraordinary story.

The letters, from family members and friends, were written between 1844 and 1899 to Ann Battles Johnson, wife of prominent Natchez businessman William T. Johnson, and her daughter Anna, while Ann's daughter Catharine wrote the diary. A freed slave herself, Ann Johnson became the head of her family and a slaveholder before the Civil War. Her days were filled with the often tedious and sometimes overwhelming...

On the Boston Common stands one of the great Civil War memorials, a magnificent bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It depicts the black soldiers of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry marching alongside their young white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. When the philosopher William James dedicated the memorial in May 1897, he stirred the assembled crowd with these words: "There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback among them, in the very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune."

In this book Shaw speaks for...

Gender is the last vantage point from which the Civil War has yet to be examined in-depth, says LeeAnn Whites. Gender concepts and constructions, Whites says, deeply influenced the beliefs underpinning both the Confederacy and its vestiges to which white southerners clung for decades after the Confederacy's defeat. Whites's arguments and observations, which center on the effects of the conflict on the South's gender hierarchy, will challenge our understanding of the war and our acceptance of its historiography.

The ordering principle of gender roles and relations in the antebellum South,...