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Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation by John Boyko
In Blood and Daring, lauded historian John Boyko tells the story of Canada's engagement in the American Civil War through the lens of six fascinating characters: a fugitive slave, a covetous American secretary of state, a New Brunswick woman who served in the Union army disguised as a man, a newspaperman turned political visionary, a master of Confederate spies operating out of a Toronto barroom, and the masterful politician who forged a nation under an imminent threat of invasion. With his gripping account, Boyko brilliantly produces a fresh understanding of the founding of one nation, and the redemption and revival of another in an era that continues to define them both.
Call Number: E 540 .C25 B69 2014
ISBN: 9780307361462
Publication Date: 2014-05-06
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust
An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.--From publisher description.
Call Number: E 468.9 .F385 2008
ISBN: 9780375404047
Publication Date: 2008-01-08
God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War by George C. Rable
Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Now, in God's Almost Chosen Peoples, Lincoln Prize-winning historian George C. Rable offers a groundbreaking account of how Americans of all political and religious persuasions used faith to interpret the course of the war. Examining a wide range of published and unpublished documents--including sermons, official statements from various churches, denominational papers and periodicals, and letters, diaries, and newspaper articles--Rable illuminates the broad role of religion during the Civil War, giving attention to often-neglected groups such as Mormons, Catholics, blacks, and people from the Trans-Mississippi region. The book underscores religion's presence in the everyday lives of Americans north and south struggling to understand the meaning of the conflict, from the tragedy of individual death to victory and defeat in battle and even the ultimate outcome of the war. Rable shows that themes of providence, sin, and judgment pervaded both public and private writings about the conflict. Perhaps most important, this volume--the only comprehensive religious history of the war--highlights the resilience of religious faith in the face of political and military storms the likes of which Americans had never before endured. --From the publisher.
Call Number: E 635 .R33 2010
ISBN: 9780807834268
Publication Date: 2010-11-29
A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates
When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted more than anything to be a Union soldier, an impossible dream for a thirty-nine-year-old woman, who stood a slender five feet tall. Determined to serve, she became a veritable soldier, a nurse, and a one-woman relief agency operating in the heart of the conflict. Now, award-winning author Stephen B. Oates, drawing on archival materials not used by her previous biographers, has written the first complete account of Clara Barton's active engagement in the Civil War. By the summer of 1862, with no institutional affiliation or official government appointment, but impelled by a sense of duty and a need to heal, she made her way to the front lines and the heat of battle. Oates tells the dramatic story of this woman who gave the world a new definition of courage, supplying medical relief to the wounded at some of the most famous battles of the war -- including Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Battery Wagner, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg. Under fire with only her will as a shield, she worked while ankle deep in gore, in hellish makeshift battlefield hospitals -- a bullet-riddled farmhouse, a crumbling mansion, a windblown tent. Committed to healing soldiers' spirits as well as their bodies, she served not only as nurse and relief worker, but as surrogate mother, sister, wife, or sweetheart to thousands of sick, wounded, and dying men. Her contribution to the Union was incalculable and unique. It also became the defining event in Barton's life, giving her the opportunity as a woman to reach out for a new role and to define a new profession. Nursing, regarded as a menial service before the war, became a trained, paid occupation after the conflict. Although Barton went on to become the founder and first president of the Red Cross, the accomplishment for which she is best known, A Woman of Valor convinces us that her experience on the killing fields of the Civil War was her most extraordinary achievement. Drawing on archival material, Oates renders Clara Barton's wartime experience as one no else can do. Though Barton's personal exploits as a nurse have been obscured by the legacy of the Red Cross, Oates persuades readers that her experience on the killing fields of the Civil War was her most extraordinary achievement. Photos. Map.
Call Number: E 621 .O24 1995
ISBN: 9780028740126
Publication Date: 1995-05-01
Hospital Sketches by Louisa Alcott; Alice Fahs
Several years before Louisa May Alcott createdLittle Women(1868), her most well known novel, she worked as a nurse at a soldiers' hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Drawing on that experience, Alcott wroteHospital Sketches(1863), a vivid account that offers rich insights into women's wartime roles, the shocking conditions in soldiers' hospitals, the lives of the soldiers themselves, and the racial prejudice of the time. Part of a vast outpouring of popular Civil War literature published during the conflict,Hospital Sketchestells us much about mid-nineteenth-century literary culture and the ways in which the war was re-created in literature for the reading public in the North. Alice Fahs's introduction supplies biographical, literary, and historical context for Alcott's work. Illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography add to the volume's value.
Call Number: PS 1017 .H79 2004
ISBN: 9780312260286
Publication Date: 2003-09-25
The Civil War As Global Conflict by David T. Gleeson (Editor); Simon Lewis (Editor)
A collection of essays highlighting the war not only as a North American conflict but as a global one In an attempt to counter the insular narratives of much of the sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War in the United States, editors David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis present this collection of essays that examine the war as more than a North American conflict, one with transnational concerns. The book, while addressing the origins of the Civil War, places the struggle over slavery and sovereignty in the United States in the context of other conflicts in the Western hemisphere. Additionally Gleeson and Lewis offer an analysis of the impact of the war and its results overseas. Although the Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history and arguably its single most defining event, this work underscores the reality that the war was by no means the only conflict that ensnared the global imperial powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In some ways the Civil War was just another part of contemporary conflicts over the definitions of liberty, democracy, and nationhood. The editors have successfully linked numerous provocative themes and convergences of time and space to make the work both coherent and cogent. Subjects include such disparate topics as Florence Nightingale, Gone with the Wind, war crimes and racial violence, and choices of allegiance made by immigrants to the United States. While we now take for granted the nation's values of freedom and democracy, we cannot understand the impact of the Civil War and the victorious "new birth of freedom" without thinking globally. The contributors to The Civil War as Global Conflict reveal that Civil War-era attitudes toward citizenship and democracy were far from fixed or stable. Race, ethnicity, nationhood, and slavery were subjects of fierce controversy. Examining the Civil War in a global context requires us to see the conflict as a seminal event in the continuous struggles of people to achieve liberty and fulfill the potential of human freedom. The book concludes with a coda that reconnects the global with the local and provides ways for Americans to discuss the war and its legacy more productively. Contributors O. Vernon Burton Edmund L. Drago Hugh Dubrulle Niels Eichhorn W. Eric Emerson Amanda Foreman David T. Gleeson Matthew Karp Simon Lewis Aaron W. Marrs Lesley Marx Joseph McGill James M. McPherson Alexander Noonan Theodore N. Rosengarten Edward B. Rugemer Jane E. Schultz Aaron Sheehan-Dean Christopher Wilkins
ISBN: 9781611173260
Publication Date: 2014-04-23
Disunion!: the Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 by Elizabeth R. Varon
In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows,'disunion'connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders'effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.
ISBN: 9780807887189
Publication Date: 2008-11-15
Hospital Sketches by Louisa Alcott; Alice Fahs
Several years before Louisa May Alcott createdLittle Women(1868), her most well known novel, she worked as a nurse at a soldiers' hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Drawing on that experience, Alcott wroteHospital Sketches(1863), a vivid account that offers rich insights into women's wartime roles, the shocking conditions in soldiers' hospitals, the lives of the soldiers themselves, and the racial prejudice of the time. Part of a vast outpouring of popular Civil War literature published during the conflict,Hospital Sketchestells us much about mid-nineteenth-century literary culture and the ways in which the war was re-created in literature for the reading public in the North. Alice Fahs's introduction supplies biographical, literary, and historical context for Alcott's work. Illustrations, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography add to the volume's value.
ISBN: 9780312260286
Publication Date: 2003-09-25
War upon the Land by Lisa M. Brady; Paul S. Sutter (Series edited by)
In this first book-length environmental history of the American Civil War, Lisa M. Brady argues that ideas about nature and the environment were central to the development and success of Union military strategy. From the start of the war, both sides had to contend with forces of nature, even as they battled one another. Northern soldiers encountered unfamiliar landscapes in the South that suggested, to them, an uncivilized society's failure to control nature. Under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan, the Union army increasingly targeted southern environments as the war dragged on. Whether digging canals, shooting livestock, or dramatically attempting to divert the Mississippi River, the Union aimed to assert mastery over nature by attacking the most potent aspect of southern identity and poweragriculture. Brady focuses on the siege of Vicksburg, the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, marches through Georgia and the Carolinas, and events along the Mississippi River to examine this strategy and its devastating physical and psychological impact. Before the war, many Americans believed in the idea that nature must be conquered and subdued. Brady shows how this perception changed during the war, leading to a wider acceptance of wilderness. Connecting environmental trauma with the onset of American preservation, Brady pays particular attention to how these new ideas of wilderness can be seen in the creation of national battlefield memorial parks as unaltered spaces. Deftly combining environmental and military history with cultural studies, War upon the Land elucidates an intriguing, largely unexplored side of the nation's greatest conflict.
ISBN: 9780820343839
Publication Date: 2012-04-01
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