Author: Peter J. Parish Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 9780823222940 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
In this rich collection, a leading historian argues that in order to fully understand the Civil War, we need to grasp the relationship between American national identity and the values of Northern society. Northerners shaped nationalism into an ideology to justify and sustain a war against the South. Parish explores politics and religion as sinews that connected Northerners to the Union cause.
Author: Susan-Mary Grant Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
This text argues that the Civil War truly formed the American nation and that the antebellum period was the crucial phase of American national construction. Grant focuses on a Northern nationalism based on an opposition to things Southern and links national construction with European nationalism.
Author: Elizabeth R. Varon Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807887188 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 470
Book Description
In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis of 1860-61.
Author: David Goldfield Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1608193748 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 642
Book Description
In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.
Author: Samuel Graber Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 081394239X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
The first thoroughly interdisciplinary study to examine how the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Britain helped shape the conflicts between North and South in the decade before the American Civil War, Twice-Divided Nation addresses that influence primarily as a problem of national memory. Samuel Graber argues that the nation was twice divided: first, by the sectionalism that resulted from disagreements concerning slavery; and second, by Unionists’ increasing sense of alienation from British definitions of nationalism. The key factor in these diverging national concepts of memory was the emergence of a fiercely independent press in the U.S. and its connections to Britain and British news. Failing to recognize this shifting transatlantic dynamic during the Civil War era, scholars have overlooked the degree to which the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was regarded at home and abroad as a referendum not merely on Lincoln’s election or the Constitution or even slavery, but on the nationalist claim to an independent past. Graber shows how this movement toward cultural independence was reflected in a distinctively American literature, manifested in the writings of such diverse figures as journalist Horace Greeley and poet Walt Whitman.
Author: Harry S. Stout Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101126728 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 577
Book Description
A profound and timely examination of the moral underpinnings of the War Between the States The Civil War was not only a war of armies but also a war of ideas, in which Union and Confederacy alike identified itself as a moral nation with God on its side. In this watershed book, Harry S. Stout measures the gap between those claims and the war’s actual conduct. Ranging from the home front to the trenches and drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Stout explores the lethal mix of propaganda and ideology that came to justify slaughter on and off the battlefield. At a time when our country is once again at war, Upon the Altar of the Nation is a deeply necessary book.
Author: Roger Lowenstein Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0735223564 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
“Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.” —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country’s history Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern “for” its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them. Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans. Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while desperately battling to contain wartime inflation. And while the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. The impact was revolutionary. The activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy. It established a progressive income tax and created the greenback—paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage its cotton wealth to finance the war. Founded in a crucible of anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other means of government financing, save for its overworked printing presses. This led to an epic collapse. Though Confederate troops continued to hold their own, the North’s financial advantage over the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefields. Roger Lowenstein reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation. Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Author: Lorien Foote Publisher: Fordham University Press ISBN: 0823264505 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War–era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union. Broadly defining “intellectuals” to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed. Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners’ conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state? Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war. Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation’s intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.
Author: Samuel J. Graber Publisher: ISBN: 9780813942384 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The first thoroughly interdisciplinary study to examine how the transatlantic relationship between the United States and Britain helped shape the conflicts between North and South in the decade before the American Civil War, Twice-Divided Nation addresses that influence primarily as a problem of national memory. Samuel Graber argues that the nation was twice divided: first, by the sectionalism that resulted from disagreements concerning slavery; and second, by Unionists' increasing sense of alienation from British definitions of nationalism. The key factor in these diverging national concepts of memory was the emergence of a fiercely independent press in the U.S. and its connections to Britain and British news. Failing to recognize this shifting transatlantic dynamic during the Civil War era, scholars have overlooked the degree to which the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was regarded at home and abroad as a referendum not merely on Lincoln's election or the Constitution or even slavery, but on the nationalist claim to an independent past. Graber shows how this movement toward cultural independence was reflected in a distinctively American literature, manifested in the writings of such diverse figures as journalist Horace Greeley and poet Walt Whitman.
Author: Abraham Lincoln Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504080246 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 9
Book Description
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.”
Author: Peter J. Parish
Author: Susan-Mary Grant
Author: Elizabeth R. Varon
Author: David Goldfield
Author: Samuel Graber
Author: Harry S. Stout
Author: Roger Lowenstein
Author: Lorien Foote
Author: Samuel J. Graber
Author: Abraham Lincoln