This account of women's abolitionist activity during the Civil War offers new evidence of the extent of women's political activism and insightfully reveals the historical significance of this activism. Through the Woman's National Loyal League, women were introduced into the political sphere from which they had previously been barred. The work of women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony opened new avenues for feminist activism after the war. In her analysis Wendy Hamand Venet examines how the rift in the league influenced the feminist movement positively by impelling its leaders to distinguish their cause from other political concerns and place it in the spotlight.
In Bullets Not Ballots, Jacqueline L. Hazelton challenges the claim that winning "hearts and minds" is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. Hazelton argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. Hazelton offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions—the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War—to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, Bullets Not Ballots makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success—and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.
The Voluntaryists are Libertarians who have organized to promote non-political strategies to achieve a free society. We reject electoral politics, in theory and in practice as incompatible with libertarian goals. Governments must cloak their actions in an aura of moral legitimacy in order to sustain their power, and political methods invariably strengthen that legitimacy. Voluntarists seek instead to delegitimize the state through education, and we advocate withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which state power ultimately depends.
In 1845 Atlanta was the last stop at the end of a railroad line, the home of just twelve families and three general stores. By the 1860s, it was a thriving Confederate city, second only to Richmond in importance. A Changing Wind is the first history to explore what it meant to live in Atlanta during its rapid growth, its devastation in the Civil War, and its rise as a “New South” city during Reconstruction. A Changing Wind brings to life the stories of Atlanta’s diverse citizens. In a rich account of residents’ changing loyalties to the Union and the Confederacy, the book highlights the unequal economic and social impacts of the war, General Sherman’s siege, and the stunning rebirth of the city in postwar years. The final chapter focuses on Atlanta’s collective memory of the Civil War, showing how racial divisions have led to differing views on the war’s meaning and place in the city’s history.
Originally published in 1870, this essay by the American anarchist and political philosopher Lysander Spooner is here reproduced. Described by Murray Rothbard as "the greatest case for anarchist political philosophy ever written", Spooner's lengthy essay is still referenced by anarchists and philosophers today. In it, he argues that the American Civil War violated the US Constitution, thus rendering it null and void. An indispensable read for political historians both amateur and professional alike. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
This previously unpublished diary is the best-surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War-era Atlanta. Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) kept a diary for sixty-seven years. This volume excerpts the diary from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City. The Richardses were among the last Confederate loyalists to leave Atlanta. Sam's recollections of the Union bombardment, the evacuation of the city, the looting of his store, and the influx of Yankee forces are riveting. Sam was a Unionist until 1860, when his sentiments shifted in favor of the Confederacy. However, as he wrote in early 1862, he had "no ambition to acquire military renown and glory." Likewise, Sam chafed at financial setbacks caused by the war and at Confederate policies that seemed to limit his freedom. Such conflicted attitudes come through even as Sam writes about civic celebrations, benefit concerts, and the chaotic optimism of life in a strategically critical rebel stronghold. He also reflects with soberness on hospitals filled with wounded soldiers, the threat of epidemics, inflation, and food shortages. A man of deep faith who liked to attend churches all over town, Sam often commments on Atlanta's religious life and grounds his defense of slavery and secession in the Bible. Sam owned and rented slaves, and his diary is a window into race relations at a time when the end of slavery was no longer unthinkable. Perhaps most important, the diary conveys the tenor of Sam's family life. Both Sam and his wife, Sallie, came from families divided politically and geographically by war. They feared for their children's health and mourned for relatives wounded and killed in battle. The figures in Sam Richards's Civil War Diary emerge as real people; the intimate experience of the Civil War home front is conveyed with great power.
Congress is crippled by ideological conflict. The political parties are more polarized today than at any time since the Civil War. Americans disagree, fiercely, about just about everything, from terrorism and national security, to taxes and government spending, to immigration and gay marriage. Well, American elites disagree fiercely. But average Americans do not. This, at least, was the position staked out by Philip Converse in his famous essay on belief systems, which drew on surveys carried out during the Eisenhower Era to conclude that most Americans were innocent of ideology. In Neither Liberal nor Conservative, Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe argue that ideological innocence applies nearly as well to the current state of American public opinion. Real liberals and real conservatives are found in impressive numbers only among those who are deeply engaged in political life. The ideological battles between American political elites show up as scattered skirmishes in the general public, if they show up at all. If ideology is out of reach for all but a few who are deeply and seriously engaged in political life, how do Americans decide whom to elect president; whether affirmative action is good or bad? Kinder and Kalmoe offer a persuasive group-centered answer. Political preferences arise less from ideological differences than from the attachments and antagonisms of group life.
