A fictionalized account of Lee Ho-chul's inglorious yet dramatic experiences as a raw recruit in the North Korean army and, soon afterward, as a prisoner of war. Beginning with some fascinating vignettes of North Korean high school life and ending with a narrow escape from death, it offers a unique perspective on the early phases of the war.

In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war. Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory. Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women--black and white--on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era

In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association (2021) From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations, Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy. While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.

Since the Antebellum days there has been a tendency to view the South as martially superior to the North. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Southern elites viewed Confederate soldiers as gallant cavaliers, their Northern enemies as mere brutish inductees. An effort to give an unbiased appraisal, this book investigates the validity of this perception, examining the reasoning behind the belief in Southern military supremacy, why the South expected to win, and offering an cultural comparison of the antebellum North and South. The author evaluates command leadership, battle efficiency, variables affecting the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and which side faced the more difficult path to victory and demonstrated superior strategy.

When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further -- to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons -- Englishmen of German descent -- some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament -- differences that made civil war inevitable.

Award-winning author and historian Lochlainn Seabrook has done it again. He's given traditional Southerners yet another book that not only rectifies many of the notoriously false Yankee myths floating around out there, but one that makes Southerners genuinely proud to be Southern! This brief work, provocatively entitled "Give This Book to a Yankee! A Southern Guide to the Civil War For Northerners," is a loosely based distillation of his popular blockbuster "Everything You Were Taught About the Civil War is Wrong, Ask a Southerner!" Pared down several hundred pages for quick reading, as the title suggests, "Give This Book to a Yankee!" makes an excellent gift for your Northern friends, or even for fellow Southerners who have been inculcated with pro-North nonsense, and who need reeducating as to Dixie's authentic history. The book's nineteen chapters cover the most salient aspects of what Mr. Seabrook likes to call "Lincoln's War," including such topics as the true cause behind the conflict, the legality of secession, race relations in the Old South and the Old North, myths about so-called "slavery," the real origins of the American abolition movement, Jeff Davis, Abe Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, the treatment of blacks in the Confederate and Union armies, the KKK, Reconstruction, and much more. For scholars the book comes with over 200 endnotes and a bibliography. The Foreword is by Confederate Virginia Flagger Karen Cooper. Heavily researched and illustrated, this little book is an essential weapon anyone can use to defend Dixie and the Southern Cause, making it a must-have for traditional Southerners, Civil War buffs, and educators. At only $7.95 keep several copies with you to hand out. You never know when you're going to bump into an unenlightened Yank or reconstructed Southerner! Civil War scholar and unreconstructed Southern historian Lochlainn Seabrook, a descendant of numerous Confederate soldiers and a recipient of the prestigious Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal, is the sixth great-grandson of the Earl of Oxford and the author of over thirty popular books for all ages. A seventh-generation Kentuckian of Appalachian heritage who is known as the "American Robert Graves" after his celebrated English cousin, Seabrook has a forty-year background in the American Civil War, Confederate studies and biography, self-help, healing and health, spirituality, Jesus, the Bible, the Law of Attraction, theology, thealogy, anthropology, etymology, the paranormal, genealogy, and comparative religion and myth. A Southern Agrarian and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the National Grange, he lives with his wife and family in historic Middle Tennessee, the heart of the Confederacy. Seabrook's other titles include: "A Rebel Born: A Defense of Nathan Bedford Forrest"; "Honest Jeff and Dishonest Abe: A Southern Children's Guide to the Civil War"; "The Unquotable Abraham Lincoln: The President's Quote They Don't Want You to Know!"; "The Quotable Stonewall Jackson"; "The Alexander H. Stephens Reader"; "The Constitution of the Confederate States of America Explained"; "The Old Rebel: Robert E. Lee As He Was Seen By His Contemporaries"; "Jesus and the Law of Attraction"; and "The Bible and the Law of Attraction."