A surprisingly readable interpretation of post-Civil War Reconstruction
593618
Though Tourgee wastes no time in presenting his views on the matter - they are in the title, after all - the rhymes and reasons of Northern Pro-Recon; Northern Anti-Recon; and Southerners are all presented in a lovely non-biased light, giving the reader all of the firepower needed to agree or disagree with Tourgee. All of this is presented in a genuinely engaging storybook fashion. Recommended as an introduction to Reconstruction or as a supplement to prior learning.
4744653
The Long Shadow takes an extended look back and forward to assess the lasting impact of World War I on the culture and politics of five of the nations embroiled in that conflict.  Reading it, I was reminded of similar treatments of the American Civil War by such eminent historians as David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust, Eric Foner and others. Reynolds -- without completely buying into the notion -- uses "collective memory" and cultural remembrance to trace the ways in which the bloody battles of the western front have lived on in art, revisionist histories, perceptions of war and, importantly, the viewpoints and beliefs of those who've attempted to analyze the war and place it in its rightful historical context.

I enjoyed reading it, but two things that Reynolds ignored or barely touched upon stood out in my mind.  One was the influence of religion (faith) of the combatants; after all, in the early twentieth century, people were more consumed by faith, in whatever form.  Reynolds spends no time on how religious faith colors and directs collective memories.  Nor does he pay much if any heed to the letters home by soldiers and sailors caught up in war.  He notes that the British Tommies were a literate army, but I can't recall a single reference to the perceptions, hopes and fears of those soldiers in their letters home.  (By contrast, Civil War letters, North and South, are a treasure trove of eyewitness commentary).

Still, a book well worth reading.
4115267
I first read this book several years ago and it prompted my own interest in researching family history in the civil war. After doing so and reading many soldiers' accounts and their personal correspondence and diaries at the Emory University Manuscripts and Rare Books Library, I recently re-read Col Johnson's book. Under the Southern Cross stands up extremely well. Col. Johnson has done an amazing job of editing the various Bradwell papers into a very readable chronological narrative. The book makes no pretense of being a broadly researched history; it is a narrative of the war as seen through the eyes, experiences and opinions of Bradwell. The book rings with accuracy when read in juxtaposition with other sources.  The details of an ordinary soldier's camp life in the early chapters and the matter of fact narrative of this soldier's experiences with the cold, heat, wet, hunger, sickness and battlefield experiences, from The Seven Days to Appomattox, are intensely interesting. There are many high altitude, all encompassing histories of the major civil war engagements but few books written from the perspective of a soldier on the front line. That this one was actually written by a soldier and delivered to us in a laboriously edited form by Co. Johnson is a real treat for anyone interested in civil war history, especially regarding the Army of Northern Virginia.
33701
At the Edge of the Precipice by the distinguished historian, Robert Remini, is a fine little book that chronicles the sad story of the inevitable failure of political compromise that led to Civil War.  Remini is a fine writer and tells the tale of how generations of political compromise were ultimately foiled and the nation found itself embroiled in Civil War.  In this very fine survey, readers can gain great understanding of the role of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and others who struggled with the issues of state's rights and slavery.  I highly recommend this work to all who want a better understanding of how the Civil War came about.
2138901
Our history books do not adequately cover this Reconstruction time after the Civil War.  Personally, I think it is this time period that laid the groundwork (or didn't) for what happened after the Civil War.  This book is excellent because the reading is interesting for a middle school population and is written in such a way that they can access it.  Therefore, I think it is an excellent choice to broaden any middle school social studies curriculum.
4183618
After release from incarceration in Ft. Monroe, Jefferson Davis retired to Beauvoir, a plantation home in Mississippi.  Encouraged by his colleagues to write a defense of the cause for which they fought he wrote a two-volume treatise entitled,  "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," from his unique perspective as the one and only President of the Confederate States of America.  His work gives insights into the factors leading to the WBTS from the southern perspective; insights that he alone could provide.

In Volume I he gives an eloquent defense of the constitutional right of secession.  Simply stated, the Union was formed by the States, not States by the Union.  If a state voluntarily joined, it could voluntarily secede; a position first advanced by the states of New England after the Louisiana Purchase in 1802.  He repeatedly cites the Declaration of Independence and the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in support of his position.

He then outlines the oppressive measures taken by the North to coerce the South into submission including denying slave-owners the right to move into new territories and high tariffs enacted to benefit northern industrialists at the expense of southern agriculturalists.  He lists pain-staking efforts of the Southern states to right these wrongs shy of secession.  They were of no avail.

He then explodes the myth that since the South fired the first shot at Ft. Sumter S.C. they were the aggressors.  He brings to light the little known, yet pain-staking efforts made by peace-loving citizens, north and south, to avoid this tragedy, all of which were nullified by President Lincoln.  War was the inevitable result!

President Davis' memoirs were largely ignored outside the south after the war, and in this, an age of political correctness, largely languishes in obscurity today.  This does not mean they are either erroneous or irrelevant in our present day.  If you consider yourself an honest historian of the period, you owe it to yourself to examine the conflict from both sides. While it is anything but light reading it would be an insult to give this historical treasure anything less than the five stars it so richly deserves!!
689423
This isn't the best history book I've ever read -- indeed, purely as a reading experience it was not enjoyable. But as a work of scholarship that explores a complex and too-little-considered subject, Robert Durden's book is extremely informative and worth the time of any Civil War student who wants to go beyond the trumpets and drums to examine the true nature of the Confederate States of America.

Durden did not so much "write" as "compile" "The Gray and the Black." About 90 percent of the prose here consists of newspaper editorials, speeches, letters and other Civil War-era documents that express a variety of Confederate views on slavery and, specifically, on proposals made in the last two years of the war to arm and train Southern blacks as combat soldiers for the armies of the CSA.  Durden focuses specifically on the efforts by Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders late in 1864 that led eventually to action by the Confederate Congress in March 1865.  By then, of course, it was far too late for the few southern blacks who got into training to make any difference in the outcome of the war. Less than a month after the law was passed, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his dwindling Confederate army at Appomattox Court House.

The book is most enlightening in illustrating the clash of opinions between those who, with some reluctance, saw the arming and training of black slaves as Confederate soldiers as the major hope for Southern military success after the fall of 1864, and other white Southerners who viewed the proposed transformation of blacks into combat troops as a betrayal of widely held theories of white supremacy that were used to justify black slavery. Durden also shows how legal questions of states' rights and property rights hampered efforts by Davis and others to enlist black soldiers for the Confederate cause, as well as the great awareness among most Confederates that the Union Army had enlisted large numbers of African-Americans to fight against them.

Although not its specific topic, this book is especially useful in countering arguments by present-day Confederate apologists who claim that Southern blacks served in the Confederate armies in large numbers.  Certainly, many black Southerners did perform various non-combat jobs in Confederate service -- teamsters, cooks, hospital aides, body servants to white soldiers -- but the vehement controversy over arming black men to fight for the Confederacy, as portrayed by Durden, indicates that black combat soldiers in gray uniforms were a novelty -- or an anathema -- to most white Southerners.  No doubt there were individual black or mulatto Southerners who fought with a certain Confederate unit on this occasion or that; but did these isolated incidences have any significant impact on the racial attitudes of white Southerners?  Even among proponents of training blacks as combat troops, there is little evidence that their desperation to preserve Confederate independence had much influence on their overall sense of white supremacy.  Even those who advocated freedom for slaves who would become Confederate soldiers were hardly ready to elevate free black men to a political and social status equal to that of white Confederate veterans. (Perhaps it should be noted that the racial attitudes of white Northerners also were little affected by the loyal service of 200,000 black Union soldiers.)

I am interested to see how this topic is treated in Bruce Levine's new study, "Confederate Emancipation," but "The Gray and the Black" will likely remain a valuable examination of the topic because of the wealth of primary source material Durden has accumulated here.  Much of the 19th-century prose is dense and makes for hard slogging (but is fun to declaim aloud); and one wishes there were more, shorter chapters. Still, this is a basic book on the Civil War, one that not only illuminates the issue of Confederate emancipation efforts, but also sheds much light on the shifting racial attitudes of the Confederacy in its dying days.
3527235
Anyone interested in the post-civil war period of Reconstruction must read Dunning. It is still a valuable recapitulation and interpretation of the events of one of our darkest American periods. It is indisputably a classic text in American history. Claims of its utter refutation are based purely on the left-leaning political bias of "modern" historians/polemicists such as Eric Foner and other Marxist-influenced revisionists. Racism is NOT the dominant force behind Dunning's text. Reconstruction, as pursued by the Radical Republicans, was a period of excessive punishment of the South for their beliefs in their God-given right to secede from a nation that had lost sight of the Constitutional constraints on an increasingly tyrannical Federal government. The immorality of slavery provided these ideologues with the cover they needed to justify the destruction of what they considered to be a dangerous Southern agrarian, unapologetically Christian, and anti-statist culture. It was a period of wanton theft of Southern wealth and what we would now call ethnic cleansing and forced "cultural" reeducation. The South was illegally occupied, systematically disfranchised, and abused by the most unethical and illegitimate of civil governments in the history of the USA. Given such a military occupation, it is amazing that there was so little subsequent guerrilla-based irregular warfare. The relative lack of such a response is due to the utter military defeat and subsequent brutal (and illegal) punishment meted out by a vengeful North. History is always driven by the politics of the observers. Read Dunning if you want to understand better the foundations of the Southern perspective of Reconstruction, now lost in our propaganda-spewing public education system. The label of "racism" is applied to all thoughts outside of the monolithic politically correct progressive viewpoint of our current group of "professional historians". Such labels damage the pursuit of historical understanding.
3182299
I found it to be quite interesting and informative. After the Civil War, former slaves have no education and no place to go.  The mood of the white southerners is dark and angry after losing the war and the KKK is on the rise.  This novel chronicles the lives of a wealthy plantation owning family in Union County, Arkansas, with ties to English nobility.  The relationship between the head of the family and a certain former slave gives rise to possibilities that could never have been imagined in this period of time or place.
1286461
In this book, Ash analyzes the Southern experience in areas invaded by Union troops during the Civil War.  Whereas most other studies on this subject deal with a specific town or locality, Ash's book presents an inclusive synthesis that examines the commonalities of the occupation throughout the South.  Three main themes direct his study of occupation.  One examines how Northern policies regarding the South during occupation developed over the course of the war.  Another theme appraises how three different geographical segments of the South experienced occupation (garrison towns, the Confederate frontier, and no-man's land).  Finally, Ash looks at how occupation by Federal forces led to internal conflicts between Southerners of varied political, social, and economic groups.

 In Ash's study, three important hallmarks of the South were its social hierarchy, its rural communalism, and its race relations.  These elements worked in combination to create a unique society that Northern invaders perceived as both backward and foreign.  Because of the cultural disparities between the North and the South, the arrival of Union occupying troops was a greatly feared occurrence by Southerners.  However, initial Southern interactions with Union troops proved to be less volatile than was originally thought.  Despite Northern attempts to remain equitable and lenient within occupied areas, Southern recalcitrance persisted.  The continuation of these rebellious attitudes forced Union troops to adopt a harsher policy in their administration of the occupied South, leading to further antagonism between the Union military and Southerners.  The "hard policy" of Union occupation also increased existing internal conflicts in the South, such as those between slaves and their masters, Unionists and their secessionist neighbors, and poor whites and the propertied elites.  Thus, with the Union control of the South and the disruption caused by this occupation, the established elements of Southern culture (social hierarchy, rural communalism, race relations) could no longer provide a completely cohesive society.
2163028
I really enjoyed this book because of the format. This collection of essays by many writers makes it easy to put down and pick back up, as I did many times, but it also allows many voices and views to swirl around your head at once. I learned a lot about the Civil War through this book, whether on big topics such as emancipation or smaller topics such as what exactly amputation was like. Not a game-changer in Civil War history, but highly recommended for any history nerd like me.
4809052
The period of Reconstruction is much, much more than the story of former slaves, however one of the core themes of Reconstruction is the withdrawal of Union troops by President Hayes and the subsequent implementation of Jim Crow in the late 19th century and early 20 century South.  This is a shameful, compelling story of physical violence, wilful denial of voting rights, and subjugation of former slaves to the lowest economic levels of society.  Even FDR was indifferent to the lynching problems in the South, in the greater interest of not antagonizing the Southern Democrats.  But thankfully Eleanor R. had the generosity and understanding of the situation to constantly hound her husband into paying attention. This is an excellent coffee table book, amd more.
3122065
This compilation of many scholarly resources presented in an easily digestible format (with ample illustrations), has many merits, the best of them being that it serves as hub for all of the well-known historical nodes that branch off from it and bracket the subject. I was very pleased for instance to see that one of the resources it leaned heavily on was Professor Genovese's "Roll Jordan Roll." And while I may have been expecting too much to hope that it would have explored a few of the newer topics that have come to light in more recent history -- such as the legacy of the role the lop-sided gender demographics played in producing mulattoes in the slave countries of the New World -- the reader can be confident that here he is getting the best story that the Western academies have been able to come up with -- short of  the more arcane missing aspects.

That story as told here is essentially that slavery has been tolerated (always morally uneasily) by societies since time immemorial -- some more comfortably than others. Most great societies of the past maintained their versions of it. However, this book fails to go into details on how these many versions of slavery differed. There is a whole other story to be told in those missing details.

The strain inflicted upon the Western world came about as an almost organic adjunct to the era of exploration, but did not get started in earnest until it was proven to be immensely profitable with regard to sugar cane in the Caribbean, and cotton in the American South, mostly during the mid-17th Century. The Western justification goes back to Aristotle's suggestion that man is "naturally" divided into rulers and the ruled, to Christian doctrines from St. Paul's Epistle to Philemon, and most of all, from the Christian story of Noah's son Ham.

Thus, as the book points out, the great shame of slavery in the New World, is how easily and how well the countries involved quickly adapted to the contradictions of slavery with their professed ideals of equality and individual freedom. How in fact those like the U.S. so easily squared the circle between their professed ideals at the same time that they came to rely on the brutal institution for their economic survival. It is these glaring contradictions that created a moral fault line that still runs down the center of American culture from the mid-17th Century to the present.

As a matter of historical fact, the book points out that the imperative for African slaves grew directly out of the decimation caused by European borne diseases that they brought to the New World that mostly as an unintended consequence  killed off almost all of both the white and indigenous slaves. Even today, historians cannot quantify either the number or the degree of suffering due to disease -- or due to the brutal trafficking in the Atlantic slave trade..

The one disappointment that I did have with the book is that it did not leave even a hint about the more important legacies of slavery that have reverberated down the centuries, especially within post-slave societies like the U.S., the Caribbean, and Brazil. The moral, economic and cultural legacy of slavery in those societies has been nothing short of shameful and is everywhere transparent even today. The last chapter, "The End of the Great Evil" was especially disappointing, as it was little more than an insult to those victimized cultures that have survived the institution. Even as it correctly admits that it took the U.S, a nation conceived and defined by, and on, the precepts of equality and individual liberty, more than two centuries to eradicate the evil, it ignores the fact that if the truth were ever told, the U.S. did not exactly eradicate slavery so much as it allowed the institution to die a natural death on its own, as a result of it finally losing all of its economic impulse and power.

That said, certainly for youngsters, this is the book for them to cut their teeth on, and to learn about the general history and conceptual contours of slavery. Four stars
3564687
This book covers new ground, and is full of information. Reader alert: the writing is quite academic in diction, vocabulary and style. For that kind of book, it is quite readable and the writing is quite good. There are a few interesting photos and a couple of maps. I'd recommend it if you have an interest in, well, black slaves and Indian masters.

There are many hundreds of books about slavery, but not much is available about Indian slave owners. This book concerns the Choctaw and Chickasaw, particularly after "Indian removal" to what is now Oklahoma. These two peoples had their own government, and were technically not US citizens until the early 1900s, when tribal governments were abolished. This meant some interesting legal wrinkles. Freeing the slaves did not at first apply to the Choctaw and Chickasaw, and slaves were not freed until 1866. They were denied citizenship in the Indian nations and were not US citizens, so their legal status was unusually complex--and Krauthamer covers this very well. The book also touches on earlier Indian slavery--groups such as the Choctaw selling Indian captives to whites, important until overwhelmed by the trade in enslaved Africans after 1720.

It would be nice to think that Native Americans were, because of their own experiences of discrimination based on color, were more sympathetic with their slaves, but that was not the case. Indian masters were just as ruthless in exploiting labor and, after emancipation, sometimes turned freed black people into the same kind of serf-like sharecroppers as in places like Mississippi. The Indian acceptance of slavery and of plantation styles of life dates to around 1800 and was well-established by the time of removal (some stayed in Mississippi). The Choctaw and Chickasaw allied with the Confederacy and there was real civil war in the Indian country.

Krauthamer has fascinating discussions of the changes in Indian societies as slavery was accepted (which involved major social changes in gender roles, kinship, and attitudes about property). She looks at religion, which was unusual in that missionaries from outside were interested in converting both masters and slaves. I found the most fascinating aspect to be the status of both slaves and freed slaves under Indian law.

An interesting detail is that when Indian lands were "allotted" black people got land, too, although a lesser share. After that point both Indian and black folks experienced an inrush of people seeking land, and had difficulty maintaining a sense of who they were. That would be another book, and a chance for Krauthamer to write a better book.
3197849
An excellent walk back into one of the dusty corners of history, Shawn has gently blewn the dust away and he discovered a hidden part of a puzzle missing in our family history. On a personal level  it was amazing to read about Lewis Garnett Jordan, and his contribution as the Coodinating Secretary of the Afro-American Council,  as well as his contribution in The Civil Rights Struggle. Lewis Garnett Jordan is my great grandfather (born into slavery)our family is overjoyed at reading of his dedication and passion for the law and his fellow man. This book will be required reading for anyone wanting to understand the African American's struggle for freedom at the close of the civil war and dawn of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
4236851
Paul Kalra's thoroughly researched book examines the economic, political and social
conditions that he believes made the Civil War inevitable. Kalra discusses slavery's
constitutionally protected status and the particularly harsh slave code adopted throughout
the South, but also documents the benefits conferred by slavery on the North as well as
the South, and the daunting array of legal obstacles faced by free blacks throughout the
country. He explains how the slaveholders' dependence on the poor, non-slaveholders in the South, and
their recognition that Southern slavery could only endure if it could expand westward into the
new territories, forced them to secede once Abraham Lincoln's election made further
expansion unlikely. I read From Slave to Untouchable right after finishing The Fiery
Trial by Eric Foner, and found Kalra's book to be an invaluable companion to Foner's
because it not only presented a fresh perspective on the slavery issue, but also provided so
much information about what this country was really like before the war came.
2658604
With its well-written introduction, this marvelous book is a great way to read about one aspect of life during the American Civil War.
These recipes are taken verbatim from a magazine that was fairly widely read by the ladies of the North and South. They are all dated with the year they were published, in some cases more than once. There's a glossary and notes to help you read the somewhat antique language. There's also a wonderful reference list, with lots of titles for the Civil War historian to look for.
I wanted this book because I love being in the kitchen. I also wanted to improve my knowledge of history, as seen through the eyes of the wives, mothers and daughters. As a genealogist, this book enhances what little I know about my female Civil War ancestors. As an added bonus, many of these recipes sound recreateable in the modern kitchen! This is a great read, even if you're not a cook.