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“My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history.” —Mathew Brady Mathew Brady and his team of assistants risked their lives to capture up-close images of the fury of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Brady actually got so close to the action during the First Battle of Bull Run that he only narrowly avoided capture. Brady's Civil War Journal chronicles the events of the war by showcasing a selection of Brady's moving, one-of-a-kind images and describing each in terms of its significance. Brady’s team not only captured thousands of portraits of the combatants, the generals, the fighting men, the sick, the dead, and the dying, but also documented the infrastructure of the war machine itself, recording images of artillery pieces, the early railroads, and extraordinary engineering feats. The text by Theodore P. Savas, an expert on the Civil War, adds context to Brady's memorable photographs, creating an unrivaled visual account of the most costly conflict in American history as it unfolded. His unique record of the war gives modern readers a fascinating insight into the terrible maelstrom that shaped our nation.
During the Civil War, from 1862-1865, Walt Whitman spent much of his time with wounded soldiers, both in the field and in the hospitals. The 40 notebooks he filled became the basis for the extraordinary diary of a medic in the Civil War.
A well-educated, outspoken member of a politically prominent family in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Josie Underwood (1840–1923) left behind one of the few intimate accounts of the Civil War written by a southern woman sympathetic to the Union. This vivid portrayal of the early years of the war begins several months before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. “The Philistines are upon us,” twenty-year-old Josie writes in her diary, leaving no question about the alarm she feels when Confederate soldiers occupy her once-peaceful town. Offering a unique perspective on the tensions between the Union and the Confederacy, Josie reveals that Kentucky was a hotbed of political and military action, particularly in her hometown of Bowling Green, known as the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. Located along important rail and water routes that were vital for shipping supplies in and out of the Confederacy, the city linked the upper South’s trade and population centers and was strategically critical to both armies. Capturing the fright and frustration she and her family experienced when Bowling Green served as the Confederate army’s headquarters in the fall of 1861, Josie tells of soldiers who trampled fields, pilfered crops, burned fences, cut down trees, stole food, and invaded homes and businesses. In early 1862, Josie’s outspoken Unionist father, Warner Underwood, was ordered to evacuate the family’s Mount Air estate, which was later destroyed by occupying forces. Wartime hardships also strained relationships among Josie’s family, neighbors, and friends, whose passionate beliefs about Lincoln, slavery, and Kentucky’s secession divided them. Published for the first time, Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary interweaves firsthand descriptions of the political unrest of the day with detailed accounts of an active social life filled with travel, parties, and suitors. Bringing to life a Unionist, slave-owning young woman who opposed both Lincoln’s policies and Kentucky’s secession, the diary dramatically chronicles the physical and emotional traumas visited on Josie’s family, community, and state during wartime.
Cornelia Henrys three journals, written between 1860 and 1868, offer an excellent source for daily information on western North Carolina during the Civil War period.
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.
This volume makes available a fascinating narrative and a document of singular importance to the study of the Civil War. It provides a clear and realistic account of the author's reaction to combat and prison life on Johnson's Island in Lake Erie. Originally published 1966. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
A remarkable account of the collapse of the Old South and the final years of a young boy’s privileged but afflicted life. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty twelve-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860—just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old South is published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded—often in horrific detail—an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South. Winner, 2018, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award
The Civil War Journal of Private Heyward Emmel is a primary source documenting one man's experiences on the front line of the American Civil War. For three years, first as an infantryman in the 7th Regiment, New Jersey Volunteers, and later as a stretcher bearer in the Ambulance Corps, Emmell reports on virtually all the major campaigns of the Army of the Potomac between October 1861 and October 1864. Devoid of political editorializing, usual and unusual aspects of battles, marching and maneuvers, and camp life are described. This is the only published account of the experiences of a member of the Ambulance Corps.
"Of more than one thousand battles fought during the war," William C. Davis notes, "a few have risen to lasting fascination and prominence, some even regarded as 'turning points.' The battles included in this book are those that caused the greatest casualties, produced the greatest feats of heroism, and won or lost major campaigns. They decided the course of the war in the East and the West, set the standard for valor and sacrifice, defined who the American soldier was to be in this war and in the future, and established the American military tradition." This volume presents accounts of five Confederate victories (Fort Sumter, First Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chickamauga, and Franklin), five Union victories (New Orleans, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Nashville), and three stalemates (Monitor v. Virginia, Antietam, and Charleston). Also included are chapters on solder life, the steadfast Iron Brigade, and the first volunteer African-American combat troops recruited in the North-the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry. From the first shot in Charleston Harbor to the one-day decimation of the Southern army on the outskirts of Nashville, these pages are colored with the wide range of expectation and disappointment that frustrated the country during four years of war.