A Southern Writer and the Civil War

A Southern Writer and the Civil War PDF

Author: Jeffery J. Rogers

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-02-18

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1498502024

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Historians of the American Civil War have debated a wide range of questions raised by the war and its outcome. None have been more vigorously argued as those surrounding its outcome. One of the leading explanations for Confederate defeat has been the argument that the Civil War South lacked a national identity. Related to and supporting this argument is the contention that the Civil War South failed to produce a distinct and vibrant literary culture. These contentions have been challenged by a growing body of literature which argues that the Civil War South did produce a sense of cultural and national identity. This book adds to this counter current through an examination of the Civil War experiences and writings of the Antebellum South's leading literary figure. Surprisingly, given William Gilmore Simms' well-known status prior to the war, his life and work during the course of the war itself has been understudied. This examination reveals the depth and extent to which Simms not only supported the Confederate war effort but how Simms conceptualized and articulated a vision of Confederate nationalism.

A General History of the Civil War

A General History of the Civil War PDF

Author: Gary C. Walker

Publisher: Pelican Publishing

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781589805743

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Many people believe that the Civil War was started by the Southern states because of slavery and the issue of secession. Here the author argues differently: Southerners believed that they would benefit from a different form of government than that of their Northern neighbors. Southerners, whose economy depended on agriculture, felt that the industrialized North passed laws and set taxes unfair to the South. In this history, Walker includes descriptions of daring raids, massive battles, and life-and-death struggles that changed one nation and destroyed another. In between are tales of the North's misdeeds, such as the massacre of more than 600 American Indians, the burning of Confederate hospitals, and Lincoln's imprisonment of more than 40,000 citizens who dared to oppose him.

Blood & Irony

Blood & Irony PDF

Author: Sarah E. Gardner

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780807857670

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"Gardner's reading of a wide range of published and unpublished texts recovers a multifaceted vision of the South. For example, during the war, while its outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, women's writings sometimes reflected loyalty and optimism; at other times, they revealed doubts and a wavering resolve. According to Gardner, it was only in the aftermath of defeat that a more unified vision of the southern cause emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, white women - who remained deeply loyal to their southern roots - were raising fundamental questions about the meaning of southern womanhood in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.

What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History

What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History PDF

Author: Edward L. Ayers

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2006-08-17

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0393285154

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“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.

The Imagined Civil War

The Imagined Civil War PDF

Author: Alice Fahs

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780807854631

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Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War - the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings. Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations through which to consider the conflict, as Fahs demonstrates. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to imagine new roles for blacks in American life. By providing subjects and characters with which a broad spectrum of people could identify, popular literature invited ordinary Americans to envision themselves as active participants in the war and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation.

Still Fighting the Civil War

Still Fighting the Civil War PDF

Author: David Goldfield

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 080715217X

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"This is a probing book about the hold of the past, experienced largely as heritage and memory and not as historical understanding, on a whole region and people. Goldfield treats the Lost Cause with unblinking directness.... its main strength: the stress on the weight of memory and its enduring links to white supremacy." -- David W. Blight, Southern Cultures "Drawing on a wide range of sources as well as contemporary reporting, this deftly written historical analysis takes on a difficult topic with passion, sensitivity, and integrity." -- Publishers Weekly In the updated edition of his sweeping narrative on southern history, David Goldfield brings this extensive study into the present with a timely assessment of the unresolved issues surrounding the Civil War's sesquicentennial commemoration. Traversing a hundred and fifty years of memory, Goldfield confronts the remnants of the American Civil War that survive in the hearts of many of the South's residents and in the national news headlines of battle flags, racial injustice, and religious conflicts. Goldfield candidly discusses how and why white southern men fashioned the myths of the Lost Cause and Redemption out of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and how they shaped a religion to canonize the heroes and deify the events of those fateful years. He also recounts how groups of blacks and white women eventually crafted a different, more inclusive version of southern history and how that new vision competed with more traditional perspectives. The battle for southern history, and for the South, continues -- in museums, public spaces, books, state legislatures, and the minds of southerners. Given the region's growing economic power and political influence, understanding this struggle takes on national significance. Through an analysis of ideas of history and memory, religion, race, and gender, Still Fighting the Civil War provides us with a better understanding of the South and one another.

The Imagined Civil War

The Imagined Civil War PDF

Author: Alice Fahs

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-03-15

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0807899291

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In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings. Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to envision new roles for blacks in American life. Recovering a lost world of popular literature, The Imagined Civil War adds immeasurably to our understanding of American life and letters at a pivotal point in our history.

Stars in Their Courses

Stars in Their Courses PDF

Author: Shelby Foote

Publisher: Modern Library

Published: 1994-06-28

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0679601120

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A matchless account of the Battle of Gettysburg, drawn from Shelby Foote’s landmark history of the Civil War Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronicle, The Civil War: A Narrative, was hailed by Walker Percy as “an unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist.” Here is the central chapter of the central volume, and therefore the capstone of the arch, in a single volume. Complete with detailed maps, Stars in Their Courses brilliantly recreates the three-day conflict: It is a masterly treatment of a key great battle and the events that preceded it—not as legend has it but as it really was, before it became distorted by controversy and overblown by remembered glory.

Patriotic Gore

Patriotic Gore PDF

Author: Edmund Wilson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 852

ISBN-13: 9780393312560

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Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans.