The American Civil War caused upheaval and massive private bereavement, but the years 1861-1865 also defined a great nation. This book provides a concise introduction to events from the secession to the end of the war. It focuses on the military progress of the war Union and Confederate politics social change - particularly the emancipation of North American slaves The social history associated with the war is dealt with alongside the familiar military and political events. This inclusive approach allows the reader to consider equally the history of men and women, blacks and whites in the conflict. It deals with both the Union and the Confederacy, integrating the latest literature on the war and society into a clear account. The book concludes with an assessment of emancipation, the rebuilding of the economy, and the war's consequences. An array of primary documents supports the text, together with a chronology, glossary and Who's Who guide to key figures.

The product of over thirty years of research on the American Civil War by Italy’s most renowned authority on the subject, this study synthetically analyzes the great drama that from 1861 to 1865 devastated the United States and gave life to the modern American nation. The book also highlights how the Civil War was the first conflict of the industrial age and an often neglected premonition of the two great world wars that shook the world in the twentieth century. The short essays presented here are the texts of five lectures delivered several years ago at the Istituto Italiano di Studi Filosofici in Naples and published in Italy in 1997.

The soldiers on both sides of the Civil War were united by a common history, and yet the legacy of this past was ambiguous, upholding both rebellion and union. Union and Confederate men went to war as Americans, convinced they fought an un-American, savage enemy. The war they fought was as emotional and catastrophic as any in history, a violent crucible that forged a new national identity. Civil War Soldiers is a fresh and compelling attempt to fathom the war's significance—then and now—and makes immediate the charged issues and bitter ironies of a nation torn by a conflict over the common ideals of liberty and justice. Drawing on diaries and letters, the focus of this pioneering study is on the men who fought, caught up in a conflict whose causes and consequences seemed as complex and contradictory to the soldiers themselves as they do to us. Reid Mitchell re-creates their experience and discusses the questions one would have most wanted to ask them: Why did you fight? How did you feel about slavery and race? What did you take home from the war? What legacy have you left us? "Fresh insights, startling descriptions, and poignant human detail about the war from the men who fought it."—Chicago Tribune

Collects the complete New York Times coverage of the events in the Civil War, including accounts of battles, personal stories, and political actions, and provides cultural and historical perspective on the published issues.

The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion. This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers. Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor. Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.

One month in 1865 witnessed the frenzied fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee's harrowing retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation. In the end, April 1865 emerged as not just the tale of the war's denouement, but the story of the making of our nation. Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history and filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States.

Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war's naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy's blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war's early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports. Meanwhile, the Confederate navy, dwarfed by its giant adversary, demonstrated daring and military innovation. Commerce raiders sank Union ships and drove the American merchant marine from the high seas. Southern ironclads sent several Union warships to the bottom, naval mines sank many more, and the Confederates deployed the world's first submarine to sink an enemy vessel. But in the end, it was the Union navy that won some of the war's most important strategic victories--as an essential partner to the army on the ground at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, Mobile Bay, and Fort Fisher, and all by itself at Port Royal, Fort Henry, New Orleans, and Memphis.