Robert Nesbit's classic single-volume history of Wisconsin was expanded by Wisconsin State Historian William F. Thompson to include the period from 1940 to the late 1980s, along with updated bibliographies and appendices. First paperback edition.
Long Remember is the first realistic novel about the Civil War. Originally published in the 1930s, and out of print sincer the 50s, this book received rave reviews from the NY Times Book Review, and was a main selection of the Literary Guild. It is the account of the Battle of Gettysburg, as viewed by a pacifist who comes to accept the nasty necessity of combat, and lives an intense and skewed romance along the way.
One hundred and fifty years after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still captures the American imagination, and its reverberations can still be felt throughout America's social and political landscape. Louis P. Masur's The Civil War: A Concise History offers a masterful and eminently readable overview of the war's multiple causes and catastrophic effects. Masur begins by examining the complex origins of the war, focusing on the pulsating tensions over states rights and slavery. The book then proceeds to cover, year by year, the major political, social, and military events, highlighting two important themes: how the war shifted from a limited conflict to restore the Union to an all-out war that would fundamentally transform Southern society, and the process by which the war ultimately became a battle to abolish slavery. Masur explains how the war turned what had been a loose collection of fiercely independent states into a nation, remaking its political, cultural, and social institutions. But he also focuses on the soldiers themselves, both Union and Confederate, whose stories constitute nothing less than America's Iliad. In the final chapter Masur considers the aftermath of the South's surrender at Appomattox and the clash over the policies of reconstruction that continued to divide President and Congress, conservatives and radicals, Southerners and Northerners for years to come. In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley wrote that the war had "wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." From the vantage of the war's sesquicentennial, this concise history of the entire Civil War era offers an invaluable introduction to the dramatic events whose effects are still felt today.
This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. The book tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and reveals an unprecedented transformation in American race relations, politics, and constitutional thought. Using a wide array of archival and published sources, Professor Vorenberg argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation occurred after, not before, the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by prior historians; and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.
For Free Press and Equal Rights is an exhaustive study of the newspapers published in the Reconstruction South that had ties to the pro-Union, northern-based Republican party. Until now, no book has been devoted entirely to this subject. Richard H. Abbott's research draws on his readings from some 430 southern Republican papers. This figure accounts for literally hundreds more papers than are cited in the handful of previously published related studies--none of which makes more than passing reference to any of the topics that Abbott covers in detail. Abbott first traces the origins of the southern Republican press from its lone stronghold in antebellum northwest Virginia to its wartime expansion in the wake of the Union Army's occupation of such far-flung places as Key West, Florida, and Port Royal, South Carolina. Abbott then discusses the challenges of establishing and sustaining a Republican press where the most likely readership--freed slaves--was usually illiterate and too poor to subscribe, much less to contribute advertising revenue. Looking at the different ways white and black editors faced common problems from ostracism and libel to vandalism and physical assault, Abbott also discusses the mixed blessings of patronage, by which Republican officials steered printing business to their party organs. Abbott's state-by-state, year-by-year analyses look at the fluctuating number of southern Republican papers in terms of their distribution in rural/urban and anti/pro-Republican areas. For Free Press and Equal Rights reveals a wealth of information about papers ranging from the Visitor of Hot Springs, Arkansas, which lasted less than a year, to the Union Flag of Jonesborough, Tennessee, which ran from 1865 to 1873. It makes a number of new and important points about political patronage and the publishing process, race and print culture, Republican ideology and rhetoric, and our first amendment rights.
Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History A Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of the Year From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent. In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense. Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota. Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.
Beginning with an account of presidential reconstruction under Lincoln and Johnson and the growing opposition to Johnson's policies, Riddleberger moves to a discussion of the Thirty-ninth Congress in December 1865 and the decision of that body to challenge Johnson's program in order to share in--if not dominate--the process of reconstruction. The election of 1866, possibly the most important nonpresidential election in our history, brought overwhelming defeat for the Johnson forces and cleared the way for congressional reconstruction of 1867. Written for both the specialist and the general reader in Reconstruction history, Riddleberger's clear narrative of national politics in 1866 and his synthesis and criticism of Beale's work and the works of revisionist historians make this book a solid contribution to the increasingly sympathetic reappraisal of the presidency of Andrew Johnson.
When Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, he had broader aims than simply rallying a war-weary nation. Lincoln realized that the Civil War had taken on a wider significance -- that all of Europe and Latin America was watching to see whether the United States, a beleaguered model of democracy, would indeed "perish from the earth." In The Cause of All Nations, distinguished historian Don H. Doyle explains that the Civil War was viewed abroad as part of a much larger struggle for democracy that spanned the Atlantic Ocean, and had begun with the American and French Revolutions. While battles raged at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, a parallel contest took place abroad, both in the marbled courts of power and in the public square. Foreign observers held widely divergent views on the war -- from radicals such as Karl Marx and Giuseppe Garibaldi who called on the North to fight for liberty and equality, to aristocratic monarchists, who hoped that the collapse of the Union would strike a death blow against democratic movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Nowhere were these monarchist dreams more ominous than in Mexico, where Napoleon III sought to implement his Grand Design for a Latin Catholic empire that would thwart the spread of Anglo-Saxon democracy and use the Confederacy as a buffer state. Hoping to capitalize on public sympathies abroad, both the Union and the Confederacy sent diplomats and special agents overseas: the South to seek recognition and support, and the North to keep European powers from interfering. Confederate agents appealed to those conservative elements who wanted the South to serve as a bulwark against radical egalitarianism. Lincoln and his Union agents overseas learned to appeal to many foreigners by embracing emancipation and casting the Union as the embattled defender of universal republican ideals, the "last best hope of earth." A bold account of the international dimensions of America's defining conflict, The Cause of All Nations frames the Civil War as a pivotal moment in a global struggle that would decide the survival of democracy.