Confederate Invention

Confederate Invention PDF Author: H. Jackson Knight
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The formation of the Confederate States of America involved more than an attempt to create a new, sovereign nation -- it inspired a flurry of creativity and entrepreneurialism in the South that fiercely matched Union ingenuity. H. Jackson Knight's Confederate Invention brings to light the forgotten history of the Confederacy's industrious inventors and its active patent office. Despite the destruction wrought by the Civil War, evidence of Confederate inventions exists in the registry of the Confederate States Patent Office. Hundreds of southerners submitted applications to the agency to secure patents on their intellectual property, which ranged from a "machine for operating submarine batteries," to a "steam plough," to a "combined knapsack and tent," to an "instrument for sighting cannon." The Confederacy's most successful inventors included entrepreneurs, educators, and military men who sought to develop new weapons, weapon improvements, or other inventions that could benefit the Confederate cause as well as their own lives. Each creation belied the conception of a technologically backward South, incapable of matching the creativity and output of northern counterparts. Knight's work provides a groundbreaking study that includes neglected and largely forgotten patents as well as an array of other primary sources. Details on the patent office's origins, inner workings, and demise, and accounts of southern inventors who obtained patents before, during, and after the war reveal a captivating history recovered from obscurity. A novel creation in its own right, Confederate Invention presents the remarkable story behind the South's long-forgotten Civil War inventors and offers a comprehensive account of Confederate patents.

Confederate Invention

Confederate Invention PDF Author: H. Jackson Knight
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
The formation of the Confederate States of America involved more than an attempt to create a new, sovereign nation -- it inspired a flurry of creativity and entrepreneurialism in the South that fiercely matched Union ingenuity. H. Jackson Knight's Confederate Invention brings to light the forgotten history of the Confederacy's industrious inventors and its active patent office. Despite the destruction wrought by the Civil War, evidence of Confederate inventions exists in the registry of the Confederate States Patent Office. Hundreds of southerners submitted applications to the agency to secure patents on their intellectual property, which ranged from a "machine for operating submarine batteries," to a "steam plough," to a "combined knapsack and tent," to an "instrument for sighting cannon." The Confederacy's most successful inventors included entrepreneurs, educators, and military men who sought to develop new weapons, weapon improvements, or other inventions that could benefit the Confederate cause as well as their own lives. Each creation belied the conception of a technologically backward South, incapable of matching the creativity and output of northern counterparts. Knight's work provides a groundbreaking study that includes neglected and largely forgotten patents as well as an array of other primary sources. Details on the patent office's origins, inner workings, and demise, and accounts of southern inventors who obtained patents before, during, and after the war reveal a captivating history recovered from obscurity. A novel creation in its own right, Confederate Invention presents the remarkable story behind the South's long-forgotten Civil War inventors and offers a comprehensive account of Confederate patents.

Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807855737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

War on the Waters

War on the Waters PDF Author: James M. McPherson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807837326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war's naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy's blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war's early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports. Meanwhile, the Confederate navy, dwarfed by its giant adversary, demonstrated daring and military innovation. Commerce raiders sank Union ships and drove the American merchant marine from the high seas. Southern ironclads sent several Union warships to the bottom, naval mines sank many more, and the Confederates deployed the world's first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. But in the end, it was the Union navy that won some of the war's most important strategic victories--as an essential partner to the army on the ground at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Mobile Bay, and Fort Fisher, and all by itself at Port Royal, Fort Henry, New Orleans, and Memphis.

Confederate Women and Yankee Men

Confederate Women and Yankee Men PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Gilpin Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain. In this UNC Press Short, excerpted from Mother's of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust explores the legendary hostility of Confederate women toward Yankee soldiers. From daily acts of belligerence to murder and espionage, these women struggled not only with the Yankee enemy in their midst but with the genteel ideal of white womanhood that was at odds with their wartime acts of resistance. UNC Press Civil War Shorts excerpt compelling, shorter narratives from selected best-selling books published by the University of North Carolina Press and present them as engaging, quick reads. Produced exclusively in ebook format, these shorts present essential concepts, defining moments, and concise introductions to topics. They are intended to stir the imagination and encourage further exploration of the original publications from which these works are drawn.

The Creation of Confederate Nationalism

The Creation of Confederate Nationalism PDF Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807116067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
For decades, historians have debated the meaning and significance of Confederate nationalism and the role it played in the outcome of the Civil War. Yet they have paid little attention to the actual development and content of this Confederate ideology. In The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that coming to a fuller understanding of southern thought during the Civil War period offers a valuable refraction of the essential assumptions on which the Old South and the Confederacy were built. She shows the benefits of exploring Confederate nationalism “as the South’s commentary upon itself, as its effort to represent southern culture to the world at large, to history, and perhaps most revealingly, to its own people.”

Confederate Odyssey

Confederate Odyssey PDF Author: Gordon L. Jones
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820346853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Throughout his life, Atlanta resident George W. Wray Jr. (1936–2004) built a collection of more than six hundred of the rarest Confederate artifacts including not just firearms and edged weapons but also flags, uniforms, and accoutrements. Today, Wray’s collection forms an integral part of the Atlanta History Center’s holdings of some eleven thousand Civil War artifacts. Confederate Odyssey tells the story of the Civil War through the Wray Collection. Analyzing the collection as material evidence, Gordon L. Jones demonstrates how a slave-based economy on the cusp of industrialization attempted to fight an industrial war. The broad range of the collection includes many rare or one-of-a-kind objects, such as a patent model and early inventions by gun maker George W. Morse, the bloodstained coat of a seventeen-year-old South Carolina soldier, battle flags made of cloth imported from England, and arms made in Georgia, the heart of the Confederacy’s burgeoning military-industrial complex. As Civil War history, Confederate Odyssey benefits from the study of material remains as it bridges the domains of professional scholars and amateur collectors such as Wray. The book tells of the stories, significance, and context of these artifacts to general readers and Civil War buffs alike. The Wray Collection is more than a gathering of relics; it is a tale of historical truths revealed in small details.

American Founding Son

American Founding Son PDF Author: Gerard N. Magliocca
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814761453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
John Bingham was the architect of the rebirth of the United States following the Civil War. A leading antislavery lawyer and congressman from Ohio, Bingham wrote the most important part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees fundamental rights and equality to all Americans. He was also at the center of two of the greatest trials in history, giving the closing argument in the military prosecution of John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. And more than any other man, Bingham played the key role in shaping the Union’s policy towards the occupied ex-Confederate States, with consequences that still haunt our politics. American Founding Son provides the most complete portrait yet of this remarkable statesman. Drawing on his personal letters and speeches, the book traces Bingham’s life from his humble roots in Pennsylvania through his career as a leader of the Republican Party. Gerard N. Magliocca argues that Bingham and his congressional colleagues transformed the Constitution that the Founding Fathers created, and did so with the same ingenuity that their forbears used to create a more perfect union in the 1780s. In this book, Magliocca restores Bingham to his rightful place as one of our great leaders. Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He is the author of three books on constitutional law, and his work on Andrew Jackson was the subject of an hour-long program on C-Span’s Book TV.

Baptized in Blood

Baptized in Blood PDF Author: Charles Reagan Wilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820306819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. “Civil religion” has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South’s relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause. While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson’s timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches. In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South’s tragic experience.

Sea of Gray

Sea of Gray PDF Author: Tom Chaffin
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374707006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
Assembled from hundreds of original documents, including intimate shipboard journals kept by Shenandoah officers, Sea of Gray is a masterful narrative of men at sea The sleek, 222-foot, black auxiliary steamer Sea King left London on October 8, 1864, ostensibly bound for Bombay. The subterfuge was ended off the shores of Madeira, where the ship was outfitted for war. The newly christened CSS Shenandoah then commenced the last, most quixotic sea story of the Civil War: the 58,000-mile, around-the-world cruise of the Confederacy's second most successful commerce raider. Before its voyage was over, thirty-two Union merchant and whaling ships and their cargoes would be destroyed. But it was only after ship and crew embarked on the last leg of their journey that the excursion took its most fearful turn. Four months after the Civil War was over, the Shenandoah's Captain Waddell finally learned he was, and had been, fighting without cause or state. In the eyes of the world, he had gone from being an enemy combatant to being a pirate—a hangable offense. Now fearing capture and mutiny, with supplies quickly dwindling, Waddell elected to camouflage the ship, circumnavigate the globe, and attempt to surrender on English soil. "A superb account of how the Confederate raider Shenandoah brought the American Civil War to the farthest reaches of the world." -- Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower and Sea of Glory

Collett Leventhorpe, the English Confederate

Collett Leventhorpe, the English Confederate PDF Author: J. Timothy Cole
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786426497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This is the story of Collett Leventhorpe (1815-1889), an Englishman and former captain in the 14th Regiment of Foot. Leventhorpe came to North Carolina about 1843, settled there, and later served the Confederacy as a colonel in the 34th and 11th N.C. and brigadier general commanding the Home Guard in eastern North Carolina. Though he trained as a physician at the College of Charleston in the late 1840s, he never practiced and was a restless man, endlessly in search of fortune--before the war in the gold fields of North Carolina and Georgia, and after it in the pursuit of lost estates, art treasures and inventions. But he excelled first and foremost as a Confederate soldier. As a field commander he was never defeated in battle, and his record was marred only by his own rejection of a much deserved but very late promotion to CSA brigadier. He lies buried in the beautiful Happy Valley section of Caldwell County.