What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History PDF full book. Access full book title What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History by Edward L. Ayers. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Get Book Here
Book Description
“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.
Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Get Book Here
Book Description
“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.
Author: James F. Epperson
Publisher: Ottn Publishing
ISBN: 9781595560025
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Explains the causes of the American Civil War, including legislative efforts to prevent the conflict, and the rising sectional tensions during the 1850s that ultimately led to rebellion by the Southern states"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Abraham Lincoln
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141956631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 114
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Address was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
Author: Charles B. Dew
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939453
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Get Book Here
Book Description
Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.
Author: James M. McPherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199741050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Get Book Here
Book Description
General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.
Author: Gene Kizer (Jr.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780985363277
Category : Fort Sumter (Charleston, S.C.)
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the North did not go to war to free the slaves or end slavery. The North went to war because it faced economic annihilation and a Southern competitor that controlled the most demanded commodity on earth: cotton. The North's economy was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world. Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860. When the South seceded, the Northern economy began a dramatic collapse, and by war time, there were hundreds of thousands of hungry, unemployed Northerners in the street --- and the "tocsin of war" sounded. Economically ignorant Northern leaders then passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff that threatened to destroy the Northern shipping industry by rerouting trade away from the high-tariff North and into the low-tariff South. The Morrill Tariff was like pumping gasoline into an already raging fire. Abraham Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history. He was president of the North, and the North was clamoring for war. He saw an opportunity to start it without appearing to be the aggressor, so he took it. Thus, he started a war that killed 800,000 men and wounded a million. The idea that the good North was so outraged over slavery that they marched armies into the South to free the slaves is an absurdity of biblical proportions and this book proves it. This is an exciting, fast-paced 360 page book using over 200 sources with everything cited in footnotes and a bibliography. Part I proves that the economic annihilation of the North was what drove Lincoln to start the war. Part II proves the right of secession, which Horace Greeley believed in until he realized that secession meant an economic catastrophe for the North. Part III is the famous treatise by Charles W. Ramsdell, "Lincoln and Fort Sumter," which proves conclusively that Abraham Lincoln started the War Between the States. Slavery was not the cause of the War Between the States, and this book makes the irrefutable argument. Here's what Dr. Clyde N. Wilson says about this book: Historians used to know - and it was not too long ago - that the War Between the States had more to do with economics than it did with slavery. The current obsession with slavery as the "cause" of the war rests not on evidence but on ideological considerations of the present day. Gene Kizer has provided us with the conclusive case that the invasion of the Southern States by Lincoln and his party (a minority of the American people) was due to an agenda of economic domination and not to some benevolent concern for slaves. This book is rich in evidence and telling quotations and ought to be on every Southern bookshelf. Clyde N. Wilson, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina.
Author: Gabor S. Boritt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Captain George S. James ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter, beginning a war that would last four horrific years and claim a staggering number of lives. Since that fateful day, the debate over the causes of the American Civil War has never ceased. What events were instrumental in bringing it about? How did individuals and institutions function? What did Northerners and Southerners believe in the decades of strife preceding the war? What steps did they take to avoid war? Indeed, was the great armed conflict avoidable at all? Why the Civil War Came brings a talented chorus of voices together to recapture the feel of a very different time and place, helping the reader to grasp more fully the commencement of our bloodiest war. From William W. Freehling's discussion of the peculiarities of North American slavery to Charles Royster's disturbing piece on the combatants' savage readiness to fight, the contributors bring to life the climate of a country on the brink of disaster. Mark Summers, for instance, depicts the tragically jubilant first weeks of Northern recruitment, when Americans on both sides were as yet unaware of the hellish slaughter that awaited them. Glenna Matthews underscores the important war-catalyzing role played by extraordinary public women, who proved that neither side of the Mason-Dixon line was as patriarchal as is thought. David Blight reveals an African-American world that "knew what time it was," and welcomed war. And Gabor Boritt examines the struggle's central figure, Lincoln himself, illuminating in the years leading up to the war a blindness on the future president's part, an unwillingness to confront the looming calamity that was about to smash the nation asunder. William E. Gienapp notes perhaps the most unsettling fact about the Civil War, that democratic institutions could not resolve the slavery issue without resorting to violence on an epic scale. With gripping detail, Why the Civil War Came takes readers back to a country fraught with bitterness, confusion, and hatred--a country ripe for a war of unprecedented bloodshed--to show why democracy failed, and violence reigned.
Author: John J. Dwyer
Publisher: Red River Press
ISBN: 9780976822400
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Was it really a civil war? Textbooks, popular history books, and documentary films, among others, have established that myth in the collective consciousness of the American people. Yet the war of 1861-1865 was no more a war to overthrow the U.S. government than the American War of Independence was a fight to topple King George and Parliament. - Back cover.
Author: Carl von Clausewitz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Gabor S. Boritt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199879729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Get Book Here
Book Description
After the Civil War, someone asked General Pickett why the Battle of Gettysburg had been lost: Was it Lee's error in taking the offensive, the tardiness of Ewell and Early, or Longstreet's hesitation in attacking? Pickett scratched his head and replied, "I've always thought the Yankees had something to do with it." This simple fact, writes James McPherson, has escaped a generation of historians who have looked to faulty morale, population, economics, and dissent as the causes of Confederate failure. These were all factors, he writes, but the Civil War was still a war--won by the Union army through key victories at key moments. With this brilliant review of how historians have explained the Southern defeat, McPherson opens a fascinating account by several leading historians of how the Union broke the Confederate rebellion. In every chapter, the military struggle takes center stage, as the authors reveal how battlefield decisions shaped the very forces that many scholars (putting the cart before the horse) claim determined the outcome of the war. Archer Jones examines the strategy of the two sides, showing how each had to match its military planning to political necessity. Lee raided north of the Potomac with one eye on European recognition and the other on Northern public opinion--but his inevitable retreats looked like failure to the Southern public. The North, however, developed a strategy of deep raids that was extremely effective because it served a valuable political as well as military purpose, shattering Southern morale by tearing up the interior. Gary Gallagher takes a hard look at the role of generals, narrowing his focus to the crucial triumvirate of Lee, Grant, and Sherman, who towered above the others. Lee's aggressiveness may have been costly, but he well knew the political impact of his spectacular victories; Grant and Sherman, meanwhile, were the first Union generals to fully harness Northern resources and carry out coordinated campaigns. Reid Mitchell shows how the Union's advantage in numbers was enhanced by a dedication and perseverance of federal troops that was not matched by the Confederates after their home front began to collapse. And Joseph Glatthaar examines black troops, whose role is entering the realm of national myth. In 1960, there appeared a collection of essays by major historians, entitled Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald; it is now in its twenty-sixth printing, having sold well over 100,000 copies. Why the Confederacy Lost provides a parallel volume, written by today's leading authorities. Provocatively argued and engagingly written, this work reminds us that the hard-won triumph of the North was far from inevitable.
