Browse Items (76 total)

By integrating evidence from soldiers and civilians, black and white, at a moment when home front and battlefront merged, Sherman's March becomes a far more complex story-one that illuminated the importance of culture for determining the limits of…

Say not we have no Poetry! The nation’s daily life struggling ‘gainst adverse fate is in itself a grand unwritten Epic! See yon long line of fresh lipped boys forth with their Mothers’ prayers & blessings on their…

In the East, Confederates enjoyed springtime victories in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, but federal movements elsewhere in the Old Dominion gave cause for alarm. The Union General George McClellan's elaborately planned Peninsula Campaign involved…

For four years, Fort Fisher was the Achilles' heel of the Union blockade. As long as it stood, Wilmington would remain open. The odds were overwhelmingly in favor of the blockade-runners that came and went virtually on schedule, openly defying the…

Antebellum southern women, like all others, lived in a discrete social system and political economy within which gender, class, and race relations shaped their lives and identities. Thus, even a preliminary sketch of the history of southern women…

Curiously, historians have tended to understate the importance of slavery within southern consciousness during the war. In part, this may be because in postbellum decades many southerners themselves disavowed slavery as a major cause of the…

Economists Robert Fogel and Stanly Engerman take a financial look at the practice of slavery. Their main argument is that it makes economic sense for a slaveholder to keep his slaves healthy. A healthy slave can do more work than a sick or beaten one…

It has become a commonplace that the war changed how Americans thought of their country. During the antebellum years, most people said “the United States are . . .” After the war, however, they said “The United States is . .…

Eugene Genovese presents the idea that slave owners are less likely to harm a slave if they have owned them from early on in the slave's life. Because of the amount of time invested by a slave owner in a particular slave, the owner may gain a sense…