A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era

With his “flair for storytelling,” Cray gives vibrancy to “scholarly conclusions of gender historians regarding the role of violence in nineteenth-century manhood,” Reviewer Lorien L. Foote writes. Foote agrees with Cray’s contention that Wilson’s story is one “’worth knowing,’” and she contends herself that “the story as Cray tells it, is worth reading.

Civil War Arkansas 1863: The Battle for a State

A Close Investigation of One State’s Experience Mark Christ, an established expert on Civil War Arkansas and the Community Outreach Director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, has produced the first book-length study of the battles and campaigns in the state during 1863. T...

Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan

Jim Lane and the Border War Robert Collins, the author of Jim Lane: Scoundrel, Statesman, Kansan, is not a professionally trained historian. This fact does not automatically demand the attention of a reviewer; writers outside of academe have produced outstanding historical biograph...

The Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line

Border War The stories of “Bleeding Kansas in the 1850’s and guerillas in Civil War Missouri are familiar to students of American history. Jeremy Neely places those stories in the context of a long transformation. His theme, as the title of the books suggests, is how the meaning of t...

The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War

Historians walk two tight ropes when they write about the past: one rope divides generalization from particularization and the other divides continuity from change. If a scholar falls off the rope and lands on one side or the other, the result is a book that oversimplifies and distorts the portrait of the past. Historians must find a way to identify broad patterns without losing variations and local nuance; they must explain change over time without losing sight of all that remained the same. It is a difficult balancing act, but when done well, tight-rope walking produces an interpretation of the past that most effectively captures its complexity. Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s mastery of the skill has produced a must-read study of the American Civil War that explains better than any existing book in the field how Americans deployed violence during the conflict. Unlike scholars who proffer generalizations that the war was either a restrained or an atrocious conflict, or that it changed from a limited to total war in a linear trajectory across time, Sheehan Dean argues that the war was both restrained and violent, and that local patterns varied across time and space. In a study that considers both the regular and irregular aspects of the war, and places it in a comparative context with other global civil and national conflicts of the 19th Century, he identifies the factors that escalated and the factors that restrained violence during the war

Seeking the one great remedy: Francis George Shaw and nineteenth-century reform.

Francis George Shaw, son of a wealthy Whig merchant who helped build the commercial infrastructure of New England, retired from commerce at a young age. This action inaugurated a lifetime devoted to scholarship and reform in which Shaw became a central figure in a number of important reform movements meant to transform America's economic, intellectual, and cultural life. An early abolitionist, Shaw became convinced that the whole structure of American society was flawed. Disenchanted with the contrast between wealth and want in the emergent capitalistic society of the 1840's, Shaw embraced Association---a French socialist movement advocating communal ownership of property and cooperative work---as an alternative to American institutions. Although Association collapsed, Shaw took its principles and applied them to the work of Reconstruction during the 1860's. His leadership of the National Freedmen's Relief Association and the American Freedmen's Union Commission moved those organizations in a more radical direction and resulted in programs which were decidedly more egalitarian than those of other organizations wedded to a free labor ideology. When Reconstruction failed and northern society experienced the pangs of industrial depression in the 1870's, Shaw rejected the liberal reform and scientific charity movements that his colleagues embraced; he believed that Henry George's Progress and Poverty offered the solution to poverty. In George's work he recognized the fundamentally communal vision he had long sought; one that promised a great cooperative society in which the government administered the benefits of shared property for the common good. Shaw's financial support and intellectual partnership were indispensable in promoting George's ideas throughout the Anglo-American world. Shaw thus became the vital link in American thought between the antebellum tradition of communalism and its late-nineteenth-century resurgence. Once again Shaw fulfilled the role he had played for so long and so well in American reform: he served as an essential conduit for reform currents surging through American society