The Age of Lincoln

A New Synthesis of Nineteenth-Century America I pick up Orville Vernon Burton\u27s The Age of Lincoln with some combination of admiration and trepidation. After all, quotes on the back cover promise a bold new synthesis (James McPherson), a striking interpretation (Eric Foner), a maj...

Civil War Almanac: The Best Civil War Books of All Time

For our latest newsstand-only special issue, The Civil War Almanac, we asked a panel of Civil War historians—J. Matthew Gallman, Matthew C. Hulbert, James Marten, and Amy Murrell Taylor—for their opinions on a variety of popular topics, including the war\u27s most overrated and underratred commanders, top turning points, most influential women, and best depictions on film. Space constraints prevented us from including their answers to one of the questions we posed: What are the 10 best Civil War books ever published (nonfiction or fiction)? Below are their responses

Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War

This superb collection of essays builds on the central observation that the Civil War was \u27a household war.\u27 Households, Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites explain, were both a “physical place and an ideological construct” that became \u27the guiding principle behind many of the war’s causes as well as the impetus for wartime strategies.\u27 In sum, the Civil War was \u27a conflict rooted in, fought by, and waged against households.\u2

A Tour of Reconstruction: Travel Letters of 1875

During the Civil War, public speaker Anna Elizabeth Dickinson became a national sensation, lecturing on abolitionism, women\u27s rights, and the Union war effort. After the war she remained one of the nation\u27s most celebrated orators and among the country\u27s most famous women. In 1875 Dickinson toured the South, lecturing and inspecting life in the southern states ten years after the war. Her letters are a fascinating window into race relations, gender relations, and the state of the southern economy and society a decade after Appomattox. In a series of long letters home to her mother, Dickinson describes the places she visits and the people she encounters in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. Her rich descriptions include detailed commentary on buildings, monuments, churches, schools, prisons, cemeteries farmland and battlefields. Her travels provide valuable information on hotels, trains, and carriages and all manner of postwar travel. Along the way Dickinson battles unreconstructed southern women, unscrupulous hotel keepers, and shady newspaper editors, while meeting a fascinating assortment of kindred spirits, both white and black.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/1175/thumbnail.jp

Exploring the Civilian Experience at Civil War Sites

This roundtable explored opportunities to use civilian experiences as a lens through which to discuss both historical worldviews as well as universal human truths, struggles, and cherished notions of loyalty, honor, survival, and sovereign decision-making, against the backdrop of war