Oxford University Press, 2001 Did the spouses of Civil War leaders ultimately affect the outcome of this pivotal event in American history? Would the war have gone differently if Stonewall Jackson or William Sherman had listened more to their wives? These are some of the questions considered in Intimate Strategies of the Civil War, although »
“At last Curtis could sense that he was closing in on the lost Confederates. It would be a two-mile trek through the seldom traveled woods outside Front Royal, Virginia, and it could easily result in a futile search for something no more than myth. As a known regional photographer, Curtis had been tipped by locals »
University of North Carolina Press, 2004 Soon after the Civil War—and long before the current interest in “historical memory”—Americans understood that the way they remembered the Civil War would define their nation. For nearly a century and a half, commemoration of the Civil War has served as a sort of national Rorschach test, exposing divisions »
“More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars combined up to Vietnam. Death touched nearly every American, north and south, of the Civil War era, yet the unanticipated scale of the destruction meant that at least half these dead remained unidentified.” We take for granted the obligation of our government »
University of North Carolina Press, 2007 If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly. Lillian Smith tried to explain it in her 1949 Killers of the Dream: “We were taught . . . to love God, to love our white »
“Decades before they used sex to sell cigarettes, they were using sectionalism to sell cigars.” Tobacco doesn’t sell itself. Its purveyors have long been pioneers in advertising and marketing techniques. Leaf through the pages of this special issue and you’ll find plenty of evidence of that: the provocatively posed photographs of women smoking; the celebrity »
“How long could slavery have continued to yield adequate financial returns to owners, putting aside any benefits in terms of non-pecuniary factors, such as the consumption of power, prestige, or the love to domineer?” Although some obscurantist southerners, a century and a half after secession, still believe slavery tangential, if not incidental, to the coming »
“‘The war is surging up close about us. – O . . . if I could put into your and every true woman’s heart the inexpressible loathing I have for it! If you could only see the other side enough to see the wrong the tyranny on both!’” The decades leading up to the Civil »
“‘No war? I have come to you directly from Washington City, where the caissons are rolling, where a great army has been gathering, where Lincoln is planning for war. Whether you are or not.’” Bland Simpson’s Two Captains from Carolina tells the story of Moses Grandy (ca. 1791–ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819–1886), »
“From the outset, Mississippi’s commission had a clear goal, evinced by its name. The Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States was unapologetically pro-Confederate, though willing to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the Union victory.” On Tuesday, March 28, 1961, the overcast clouds above Jackson, Mississippi, parted just around ten o’clock in the morning. Shortly after, »
“‘When my husband James was growing up, there was no race question. They assumed that was settled by the war. The Negroes were slaves and then they weren’t. That settled it.’” These oral history excerpts demonstrate the enduring influence the Civil War has had on southerners’ memories, family narratives, and even present-day self-perceptions. John Wesley »
“The most powerful memories of the Civil War continue to be the personal stories, and while the transmission may be sputtering today, they remain the most evocative, both of the winners’ frail victims and the losers’ human pain.” Readers who experienced the Civil War Centennial of 1961–65 may recall a pair of cartoons that circulated »