Browse Items (76 total)

In this piece of historical writing Jordan examines Tourgee as part of a larger group of individuals who were part of an anti-lynching movement during the 1800s. She first explains that he had a strong voice as a lawyer and judge which gave his…

Vance’s campaign and election matter because they highlight the role of racial fear in suppressing disaffection, in smoothing the tensions inherent in Confederate patriotism, and in keeping enlisted men committed to the war when the…

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…

This document describes numerous situations that Western North Carolina Confederate soldiers were put through, which lead to their decision to desert from the army. Questions such as "Is my loyalty worth it if my family is starving?" and "What good…

This book is a history of how Americans remembered their most divisive and tragic experience during the fifty-year period after the Civil War. It probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race and reunion in American culture and…

Just weeks after the incident in Baltimore, a fellow North Carolinian was also attacked for his abolitionist stance. Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, born and raised near Salisbury, was dismissed from his fac ulty post at the University of North Carolina…

Catherine Edmondston worried about the vehemence of her secessionist views because of the divisions they were causing in her own family. Before Lincoln’s call for troops in April 1861, Edmondston’s parents and sister remained staunch…

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…