Writing and Fighting the Civil War

Writing and Fighting the Civil War PDF Author: William B. Styple
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
"The 'Sunday Mercury's' correspondents wrote of contemporary events, scenes, and personalities. They did not write from hindsight, nor are they prone to exaggerate their personal roles. The practice of the old soldier over-emphasizing his actions and placing himself on center stage has resulted in wags referring to Henry Kyd Douglas' 'I Rode With Stonewall" as 'Stonewall Rides With Me.' Generals, such as Robert E. Lee and U.S. Grant, made it a practice to read enemy newspapers. It has been said that General Lee, because of the skill of the Confederate spy network in the Maryland counties fronting Chesapeake Bay and the Potomic River, true, insofar as it applies to the 'Sunday Mercury, ' the information reaching Lee from this source would be a spymaster's dream" from the foreward by Edwin C. Bearss.

Writing and Fighting the Civil War

Writing and Fighting the Civil War PDF Author: William B. Styple
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The 'Sunday Mercury's' correspondents wrote of contemporary events, scenes, and personalities. They did not write from hindsight, nor are they prone to exaggerate their personal roles. The practice of the old soldier over-emphasizing his actions and placing himself on center stage has resulted in wags referring to Henry Kyd Douglas' 'I Rode With Stonewall" as 'Stonewall Rides With Me.' Generals, such as Robert E. Lee and U.S. Grant, made it a practice to read enemy newspapers. It has been said that General Lee, because of the skill of the Confederate spy network in the Maryland counties fronting Chesapeake Bay and the Potomic River, true, insofar as it applies to the 'Sunday Mercury, ' the information reaching Lee from this source would be a spymaster's dream" from the foreward by Edwin C. Bearss.

Fighting for Citizenship

Fighting for Citizenship PDF Author: Brian Taylor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War–era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans. Some, like Frederick Douglass, urged immediate enlistment to support the cause of emancipation, hoping that a Northern victory would bring about the end of slavery. But others counseled patience and negotiation, drawing on a historical memory of unfulfilled promises for black military service in previous American wars and encouraging black men to leverage their position to demand abolition and equal citizenship. In doing this, they also began redefining what it meant to be a black man who fights for the United States. These debates over African Americans' enlistment expose a formative moment in the development of American citizenship: black Northerners' key demand was that military service earn full American citizenship, a term that had no precise definition prior to the Fourteenth Amendment. In articulating this demand, Taylor argues, black Northerners participated in the remaking of American citizenship itself—unquestionably one of the war's most important results.

Fighting for the Confederacy

Fighting for the Confederacy PDF Author: Gary W. Gallagher
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807882348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 693

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Book Description
Originally published by UNC Press in 1989, Fighting for the Confederacy is one of the richest personal accounts in all of the vast literature on the Civil War. Alexander was involved in nearly all of the great battles of the East, from First Manassas through Appomattox, and his duties brought him into frequent contact with most of the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet. No other Civil War veteran of his stature matched Alexander's ability to discuss operations in penetrating detail-- this is especially true of his description of Gettysburg. His narrative is also remarkable for its utterly candid appraisals of leaders on both sides.

The Civil War

The Civil War PDF Author: Bruce Catton
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618001873
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Infinitely readable and absorbing, Bruce Catton's The Civil War is one of the best-selling, most widely read general histories of the war available in a single volume. Newly introduced by the critically acclaimed Civil War historian James M. McPherson, The Civil War vividly traces one of the most moving chapters in American history, from the early division between the North and the South to the final surrender of Confederate troops. Catton's account of battles is carefully interwoven with details about the political activities of the Union and Confederate armies and diplomatic efforts overseas. This new edition of The Civil War is a must-have for anyone interested in the war that divided America.

The Civil War's African-American Soldiers Through Primary Sources

The Civil War's African-American Soldiers Through Primary Sources PDF Author: Carin T. Ford
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 0766041255
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description
This middle school series brings Civil War history to life through true stories, descriptions of major events and primary source illustrations that will enhance the reader's experience.

Fighting and Writing

Fighting and Writing PDF Author: Luise White
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021284
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
In Fighting and Writing Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, White finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods. In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.

Women’s War

Women’s War PDF Author: Stephanie McCurry
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674987977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Award “A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women.” —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass “Readers expecting hoop-skirted ladies soothing fevered soldiers’ brows will not find them here...Explodes the fiction that men fight wars while women idle on the sidelines.” —Washington Post The idea that women are outside of war is a powerful myth, one that shaped the Civil War and still determines how we write about it today. Through three dramatic stories that span the war, Stephanie McCurry invites us to see America’s bloodiest conflict for what it was: not just a brothers’ war but a women’s war. When Union soldiers faced the unexpected threat of female partisans, saboteurs, and spies, long held assumptions about the innocence of enemy women were suddenly thrown into question. McCurry shows how the case of Clara Judd, imprisoned for treason, transformed the writing of Lieber’s Code, leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Black women’s fight for freedom had no place in the Union military’s emancipation plans. Facing a massive problem of governance as former slaves fled to their ranks, officers reclassified black women as “soldiers’ wives”—placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. Finally, McCurry offers a new perspective on the epic human drama of Reconstruction through the story of one slaveholding woman, whose losses went well beyond the material to intimate matters of family, love, and belonging, mixing grief with rage and recasting white supremacy in new, still relevant terms. “As McCurry points out in this gem of a book, many historians who view the American Civil War as a ‘people’s war’ nevertheless neglect the actions of half the people.” —James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom “In this brilliant exposition of the politics of the seemingly personal, McCurry illuminates previously unrecognized dimensions of the war’s elemental impact.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering

Still Fighting the Civil War

Still Fighting the Civil War PDF Author: David Goldfield
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080715217X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
In the updated edition of his sweeping narrative on southern history, David Goldfield brings this extensive study into the present with a timely assessment of the unresolved issues surrounding the Civil War's sesquicentennial commemoration. Traversing a hundred and fifty years of memory, Goldfield confronts the remnants of the American Civil War that survive in the hearts of many of the South's residents and in the national news headlines of battle flags, racial injustice, and religious conflicts. Goldfield candidly discusses how and why white southern men fashioned the myths of the Lost Cause and Redemption out of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and how they shaped a religion to canonize the heroes and deify the events of those fateful years. He also recounts how groups of blacks and white women eventually crafted a different, more inclusive version of southern history and how that new vision competed with more traditional perspectives. The battle for southern history, and for the South, continues—in museums, public spaces, books, state legislatures, and the minds of southerners. Given the region's growing economic power and political influence, understanding this war takes on national significance. Through an analysis of ideas of history and memory, religion, race, and gender, Still Fighting the Civil War provides us with a better understanding of the South and one another.

For Cause and Comrades

For Cause and Comrades PDF Author: James M. McPherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199741050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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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.

Border War

Border War PDF Author: Stanley Harrold
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807899550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle--the underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob actions, and sectional politics--are well known as parts of other stories. Here, Stanley Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the dramatic incidents that comprised it, and its role in the complex dynamics leading to the Civil War.