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Winner of the AASLH Leadership in History Award Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause is a new history of Richmond’s famous St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, attended by Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War and a tourist magnet thereafter. Christopher Alan Graham’s narrative—which emerged out of St. Paul’s History and Reconciliation Initiative—charts the congregation’s theological and secular views of race from the church’s founding in 1845 to the present day, exploring the church’s complicity in Lost Cause narratives and racial oppression in Richmond. Graham investigates the ways that the actions of elite white southerners who imagined themselves as benevolent—liberal, even—in their treatment of Black people through the decades obscured the actual damage to Black bodies and souls that this ostensible liberalism caused. Placing the legacy of St. Paul’s self-described benevolent paternalism in dialogue with the racial and religious geography of Richmond, Graham reflects on what an authentic process of recognition and reparations might be, drawing useful lessons for America writ large.
General Thomas M. Logan was one of the youngest Confederate commanders of the Civil War. After the war, he was instrumental in mobilizing the modernization of the rail system in Virginia and called for national reconciliation and for the equal rights and education of women and former slaves.
Presenting America's slaveholders as men and women who were intelligent, honourable, and pious, this text asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself and enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves.
The most comprehensive state project of its kind, the Dictionary provides information on some 4,000 notable North Carolinians whose accomplishments and occasional misdeeds span four centuries. Much of the bibliographic information found in the six volumes has been compiled for the first time. All of the persons included are deceased. They are native North Carolinians, no matter where they made the contributions for which they are noted, or non-natives whose contributions were made in North Carolina.
Preeminent Civil War historian Frank Vandiver always longed to see an interpretive biography of Jefferson Davis. Finally, more than twenty years after Vandiver expressed that wish, publication of Jefferson Davis, Unconquerable Heart makes such an interpretive biography available. Felicity Allen begins this monumental work with Davis's political imprisonment at the end of the Civil War and masterfully flashes back to his earlier life, interweaving Davis's private life as a schoolboy, a Mississippi planter, a husband, a father, and a political leader. She follows him from West Point through army service on the frontier, his election to the U.S. House of Representatives, his regimental command ...
Richard Stoddert Ewell is best known as the Confederate General selected by Robert E. Lee to replace "Stonewall" Jackson as chief of the Second Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia. Ewell is also remembered as the general who failed to drive Federal troops from the high ground of Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill during the Battle of Gettysburg. Many historians believe that Ewell's inaction cost the Confederates a victory in this seminal battle and, ultimately, cost the Civil War. During his long military career, Ewell was never an aggressive warrior. He graduated from West Point and served in the Indian wars in Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In 1861 he resigned his commission in t...
When delegations from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and, later, Texas met in Montgomery, Alabama in February 1861 to discuss the creation of a southern national government, none had been authorized to do so by the conventions that sent them. Within weeks, however, they launched a de facto constitutional convention, formed a government, and selected Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens to serve as president and vice president of the new nation. This transpired at a critical juncture prior to Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration when eight other slave states had yet to act. The delegates understood their place on the public stage and newspapers' usefulness in espousing and galvanizing their cause. .
In the space of a few hours on the night of April 2, 1865, Richmond, the Confederate capital, was evacuated and burned, the government fled, slavery was finished in North America, Union forces entered the city and the outcome of the Civil War was effectively sealed. No official documents tell the story because the Confederate government was on the run. First there were newspaper accounts--mostly confused--then history books based on those accounts. But much of what we know about the fall of Richmond comes from "eyewitnesses" like Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory, whose tale became history. A great deal of what has been presented over the years by historians has been plagiarized, invented or misconstrued, and nearly all we have learned of Jefferson Davis's flight from Richmond to Danville is wrong. This book closely examines all relevant source material--much of it newly discovered by the author--as well as the writers, diarists and eyewitnesses themselves, and constructs a minutely detailed new account that comes closer to what Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he said, "History is not history unless it is the truth."
The fall of the Confederacy proved traumatic for a people who fought with the belief that God was on their side. Yet, as Eugene D. Genovese writes in A Consuming Fire, Southern Christians continued to trust in the Lord's will. The churches had long defended "southern rights" and insisted upon the divine sanction for slavery, but they also warned that God was testing His people, who must bring slavery up to biblical standards or face the wrath of an angry God. In the eyes of proslavery theorists, clerical and lay, social relations and material conditions affected the extent and pace of the spread of the Gospel and men's preparation to receive it. For proslavery spokesmen, "Christian slavery" ...