The Private Civil War


Book Description

Historians have given much attention to the Civil War’s prominent players—its generals, politicians, and other public leaders—but they have devoted less attention to the common soldiers and civilians—the “plain folk”—who actively participated in the conflict. In his study of popular thought during the Civil War era, Randall C. Jimerson offers a grass-roots perspective on the war by examining the thoughts and ideas of these ordinary men and women. The Private Civil War derives much of its power from the author’s deft use of personal letters and diaries. Separated from home and family, virtually every soldier and many civilians wrote frequent and informative letters or recorded daily experiences and thoughts in journals. Jimerson has consulted a broad cross section of these documents, culling information from letters and diaries written by people from every state and from all social classes and military ranks. These documents, remarkable in many instances for their depth of feeling and eloquence, provide rich, detailed information about sectional perceptions and ideology as well as many private reflections.




Private Confederacies


Book Description

How did the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction shape the masculinity of white Confederate veterans? As James J. Broomall shows, the crisis of the war forced a reconfiguration of the emotional worlds of the men who took up arms for the South. Raised in an antebellum culture that demanded restraint and shaped white men to embrace self-reliant masculinity, Confederate soldiers lived and fought within military units where they experienced the traumatic strain of combat and its privations together--all the while being separated from suffering families. Military service provoked changes that escalated with the end of slavery and the Confederacy's military defeat. Returning to civilian life, Southern veterans questioned themselves as never before, sometimes suffering from terrible self-doubt. Drawing on personal letters and diaries, Broomall argues that the crisis of defeat ultimately necessitated new forms of expression between veterans and among men and women. On the one hand, war led men to express levels of emotionality and vulnerability previously assumed the domain of women. On the other hand, these men also embraced a virulent, martial masculinity that they wielded during Reconstruction and beyond to suppress freed peoples and restore white rule through paramilitary organizations and the Ku Klux Klan.




Private Elisha Stockwell, Jr., Sees the Civil War


Book Description

Memoirs. Stockwell enlisted in the Union Army in 1862 as a boy of fifteen, and stayed until the end of the war.




Gone for a soldier


Book Description




A Yankee Private's Civil War


Book Description

Moving memoir by a writer who served as a teenaged Union recruit. True tales of punishment, revenge, devotion, and quiet heroism as well as survival methods of the average soldier.







Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Report


Book Description




Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory


Book Description

At the now-peaceful spot of Tennessee's Fort Pillow State Historic Area, a horrific incident in the nation's bloodiest war occurred on April 12, 1864. Just as a high bluff in the park offers visitors a panoramic view of the Mississippi River, John Cimprich's absorbing book affords readers a new vantage on the American Civil War as viewed through the lens of the Confederate massacre of unionist and black Federal soldiers at Fort Pillow. Cimprich covers the entire history of Fort Pillow, including its construction by Confederates, its capture and occupation by federals, the massacre, and ongoing debates surrounding that affair. He sets the scene for the carnage by describing the social conflicts in federally occupied areas between secessionists and unionists as well as between blacks and whites. In a careful reconstruction of the assault itself, Cimprich balances vivid firsthand reports with a judicious narrative and analysis of events. He shows how Major General Nathan B. Forrest attacked the garrison with a force outnumbering the Federals roughly 1,500 to 600, and a breakdown of Confederate discipline resulted. The 65 percent death toll for black unionists was approximately twice that for white unionists, and Cimprich concludes that racism was at the heart of the Fort Pillow massacre. Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory serves as a case study for several major themes of the Civil War: the great impact of military experience on campaigns, the hardships of military life, and the trend toward a more ruthless conduct of war. The first book to treat the fort's history in full, it provides a valuable perspective on the massacre and, through it, on the war and the world in which it occurred.




Understanding Civil Wars


Book Description

This volume explores the nature of civil war in the modern world and in historical perspective. Civil wars represent the principal form of armed conflict since the end of the Second World War, and certainly in the contemporary era. The nature and impact of civil wars suggests that these conflicts reflect and are also a driving force for major societal change. In this sense, Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and change in intrastate conflict argues that the nature of civil war is not fundamentally changing in nature. The book includes a thorough consideration of patterns and types of intrastate conflict and debates relating to the causes, impact, and ‘changing nature’ of war. A key focus is on the political and social driving forces of such conflict and its societal meanings, significance and consequences. The author also explores methodological and epistemological challenges related to studying and understanding intrastate war. A range of questions and debates are addressed. What is the current knowledge regarding the causes and nature of armed intrastate conflict? Is it possible to produce general, cross-national theories on civil war which have broad explanatory relevance? Is the concept of ‘civil wars’ empirically meaningful in an era of globalization and transnational war? Has intrastate conflict fundamentally changed in nature? Are there historical patterns in different types of intrastate conflict? What are the most interesting methodological trends and debates in the study of armed intrastate conflict? How are narratives about the causes and nature of civil wars constructed around ideas such as ethnic conflict, separatist conflict and resource conflict? This book will be of much interest to students of civil wars, intrastate conflict, security studies and international relations in general.




The Civil War in Books


Book Description

With the assistance of several scholars, including James M. McPherson and Gary Gallagher, and a long-time specialist in Civil War books, Ralph Newman, David Eicher has selected for inclusion in The Civil War in Books the 1,100 most important books on the war. These are organized into categories as wide-ranging as "Battles and Campaigns," "Biographies, Memoirs, and Letters," "Unit Histories," and "General Works." The last of these includes volumes on black Americans and the war, battlefields, fiction, pictorial works, politics, prisons, railroads, and a host of other topics. Annotations are included for all entries in the work, which is presented in an oversized 8 1/2 x 11 inch volume in two-column format. Appendixes list "prolific" Civil War publishers and other Civil War bibliographies, and the works included in Eicher's mammoth undertaking are indexed by author or editor and by title. Gary Gallagher's foreword traces the development of Civil War bibliographies and declares that Eicher's annotation exceeds that of any previous comprehensive volume. The Civil War in Books, Gallagher believes, is "precisely the type of guide" that has been needed. The first full-scale, fully-annotated bibliography on the Civil War to appear in more than thirty years, Eicher's The Civil War in Books is a remarkable compendium of the best reading available about the worst conflict ever to strike the United States. The bibliography, the most valuable reference book on the subject since The Civil War Day by Day, will be essential for college and university libraries, dealers in rare and secondhand books, and Civil War buffs.