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Subjects: Civil War

Forever Faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Historical Memory

by Richard D. Starnes

An important campaign of the Civil War began in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1869. Sporadic outbreaks of resistance had occurred since 1865, and the events in New Orleans merely gave organization and direction to Confederate resistance efforts. Like the military operations undertaken between 1861 and 1865, the dedicated white southerners who carried out the campaign »

The American Civil War in Economic Perspective: Basic Questions and Some Answers

by Peter A. Coclanis

“Estimating the Civil War’s cost can be a difficult and unseemly business, according to the author. Yet economists and historians keep arguing over the figure.” No event has so captured the historical imagination of Americans as the Civil War. Ask Ken Burns, creator of the acclaimed PBS series, or better yet one of his accountants. »

The Black and the Gray: An Interview with Tony Horwitz

by Tony Horwitz

Southern Cultures: So, how did you get interested in this business of Black Confederates? Tony Horwitz: I kept hearing about them wherever I went while researching my book. “Black Confederates” has become something of a mantra in certain southern circles. At Sons of Confederate Veterans meetings, there would be talk of erecting a monument to »

Equine Relics of the Civil War

by Drew Gilpin Faust

In the first battle of the Civil War, the only casualty was a horse. When the smoke lifted after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, southerners hailed the “bloodless victory” that had yielded the federal fort into Confederate hands without the loss of a single human life. The death of an army horse »

Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of North Carolina in the Civil War by Richard M. McCaslin (Review)

by William C. Harris

University of Arkansas Press, 1997 This attractive and well-designed photographic history fulfills in admirable fashion Richard McCaslin’s objective: “to present a carefully selected array of images that convey the experience of many citizens of the North State” during the Civil War. A major strength of McCaslin’s volume is the narrative account of North Carolina during »

The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the Civil War by Kristen M. Smith (Review)

by Stephen W. Berry

Hill Street Press, 1999 Each reproduction in The Lines Are Drawn is a gem in itself, documenting such familiar themes as wartime inflation and scarcity in the Confederacy, northern Copperheadism, and the iconographic rise of Abraham Lincoln and Uncle Sam. In all, Kristen M. Smith has collected 138 cartoons, comics, and caricatures related to the »

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Review)

by Bruce E. Baker

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001 America has an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about the Civil War, but here’s one that never made it into the nation’s collective memory. In May 1865 African American troops marched toward Smithfield, North Carolina. When they came to the Neuse River at the edge of town, they »