Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393247430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
Winner of the Bancroft Prize: Through a gripping narrative based on massive new research, a leading historian reshapes our understanding of the Civil War. Our standard Civil War histories tell a reassuring story of the triumph, in an inevitable conflict, of the dynamic, free-labor North over the traditional, slave-based South, vindicating the freedom principles built into the nation's foundations. But at the time, on the borderlands of Pennsylvania and Virginia, no one expected war, and no one knew how it would turn out. The one certainty was that any war between the states would be fought in their fields and streets. Edward L. Ayers gives us a different Civil War, built on an intimate scale. He charts the descent into war in the Great Valley spanning Pennsylvania and Virginia. Connected by strong ties of every kind, including the tendrils of slavery, the people of this borderland sought alternatives to secession and war. When none remained, they took up war with startling intensity. As this book relays with a vivid immediacy, it came to their doorsteps in hunger, disease, and measureless death. Ayers's Civil War emerges from the lives of everyday people as well as those who helped shape history—John Brown and Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Jackson, and Lee. His story ends with the valley ravaged, Lincoln's support fragmenting, and Confederate forces massing for a battle at Gettysburg.
Author: Edward L Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393326017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
Ayers gives readers the Civil War on an intimate scale. His masterful narrative conveys the coming of war and its bloody encounters through the eyes of those who sacrificed, fought, and died.
Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393292649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Winner of the Lincoln Prize A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective. At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.
Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190282185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Edward L. Ayers monumental history, Promise of the New South, was praised by the eminent historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown as "A work of frequently stunning beauty," who added "The elegance and sensitivity that he achieves are typical of few historical works." Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize for Best Book on American Race Relations from the Organization of American Historians, and the Frank Lawrence Owsley and Harriett Chappell Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association, and finalist for the 1992 National Book Award, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History, and the 1993 Southern Book Award, Promise of the New South established Ayers as one of the foremost scholars of the American South. Now, in this newly revised edition, Ayers has distilled this remarkable work to offer an even more readable account of the New South. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts--a time of progress and repression, of new industries and old ways. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic "Redeemers" swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Here is the local Baptist congregation, the country store, the tobacco-stained second-class railroad car, the rise of Populism: the teeming, nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. And central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement. Ayers weaves all these details into the contradictory story of the New South, showing how the region developed the patterns it was to follow for the next fifty years. A vivid portrait of a society undergoing the sudden confrontation of the promises, costs, and consequences of modern life, this is an unforgettable account of the New South--a land with one foot in the future and the other in the past.
Author: Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119716144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1223
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Book Description
A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil War Features contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarship Covers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory
Author: Robert K. D. Colby
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197578268
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
During the Civil War, enslavers bought and sold thousands of people, extending a traffic in humanity that had long underpinned American slavery. Despite the pressures of blockades, economic collapse, and unfolding emancipation, the slave trade survived to the war's end. This book provides a vivid look at life within the trade in slaves and tells the story of the wartime slave trade from the perspective of both participants in it and those subjected to it.
Author: Barry Sheehy
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1934572705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522
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Book Description
An epic iv volume history : a city & people that forged a living link between America, past & present.
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317454162
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 847
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Book Description
Provides a look at the network known as the Underground Railroad - that mysterious "system" of individuals and organizations that helped slaves escape the American South to freedom during the years before the Civil War. This work also explores the people, places, writings, laws, and organizations that made this network possible.
Author: Adam I. P. Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0230213529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
The American Civil War was by far the bloodiest conflict in American history. Arising out of a political crisis over the expansion of slavery, the war set the stage for the emergence of the modern American nation-state. This new interpretation of one of the most mythologized events in modern history combines narrative with analysis and an up-to-date assessment of the state of Civil War scholarship. The American Civil War: - Emphasizes the importance of Northern public opinion in shaping the meaning and outcome of the crisis - Argues that the war exposed deep social and political divisions within, as well as between, North and South - Explores the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians, and the political and cultural context in which they lived - Sets this distinctively American crisis over slavery and nationhood in the wider context of the nineteenth-century world Concise and authoritative, this is an indispensable introduction to a critical period in modern American history.
Author: Dwight Pitcaithley
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 162190850X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
In January 1861, Virginia possessed the largest population of enslaved people within the United States. The institution of slavery permeated the state’s social, political, economic, and legal systems. While loyalty to the Union was strong in western Virginia as Civil War loomed, the state’s elected officials painted Abraham Lincoln and Republicans as abolitionists and reaffirmed Virginia’s commitment to slavery and white supremacy. In this annotated volume of primary source documents from Secession Winter, Dwight T. Pitcaithley presents speeches by Virginians from the United States Congress, the Washington Peace Conference which had been called by Virginia’s general assembly, and the state’s secession convention to provide readers a glimpse into Virginia’s ultimate decision to secede from the Union. In his introductory analysis of the trial confronting Virginia’s leadership, Pitcaithley demonstrates that most elected officials wanted Virginia to remain in the Union—but only if Republicans agreed to protect slavery and guarantee its future. While secessionists rightly predicted that the incoming Lincoln administration would refuse to agree to these concessions, Unionists claimed that disunion would ultimately undermine slavery and lead to abolition regardless. Virginia deliberated longer and proposed more constitutional solutions to avoid secession than any other state. Only after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s request for troops to suppress the “insurrection” did Virginia turn from saving the Union to leaving it. Throughout Pitcaithley’s collection, one theme remains clear: that slavery and race—not issues over tariffs—were driving Virginia’s debates over secession. Complete with a Secession Winter timeline, extensive bibliography, and questions for discussion, Virginia Secedes: A Documentary History is an invaluable resource for historians and students alike.
