"... this volume presents a reasonable, fresh, and well-researched reading of several key texts in American studies." -- Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas During the Civil War, a crisis erupted in philanthropy that dramatically changed humanitarian theories and demanded new approaches to humanitarian work. Certain writer-activists began to advocate an "eccentric benevolence" -- a type of philanthropy that would undo the distinction between the powerful bestowers of benevolence and the weaker folks who receive it. Among the figures discussed are the anti-philanthropic Henry David Thoreau and the dangerously philanthropic John Brown.

As war raged on the battlefields of the Civil War, men and women all over the nation continued their daily routines. They celebrated holidays, ran households, wrote letters, read newspapers, joined unions, attended plays, and graduated from high school and college. Civil War America reveals how Americans, both Northern and Southern, lived during the Civil War—the ways they worked, expressed themselves artistically, organized their family lives, treated illness, and worshipped. Written by specialists, the chapters in this book cover the war’s impact on the economy, the role of the federal government, labor, welfare and reform efforts, the Indian nations, universities, healthcare and medicine, news coverage, photography, and a host of other topics that flesh out the lives of ordinary Americans who just happened to be living through the biggest conflict in American history. Along with the original material presented in the book chapters, the website accompanying the book is a treasure trove of primary sources, both textual and visual, keyed for each chapter topic. Civil War America and its companion website uncover seismic shifts in the cultural and social landscape of the United States, providing the perfect addition to any course on the Civil War.

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

This anthology brings together a wide variety of both well-known and more obscure writing from and about the Civil War, along with supplementary appendices to facilitate its use in courses. The selections include short fiction, poetry, public addresses, diary entries, song lyrics, and essays from such figures as Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Louisa May Alcott, as well as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. The writing not only includes those directly involved in the war, but also those writing about the war afterward, to include the perspective of historical memory. This collection makes a perfect addition to any course on Civil War history or literature as well as courses on popular memory.

In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with--rather than escape from or obscure--social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual--the aesthetic and the historical--can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden, like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence. In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.

The Civil War was the most traumatic event in American history, pitting Americans against one another, rending the national fabric, leaving death and devastation in its wake, and instilling an anger that has not entirely dissipated even to this day, 150 years later. This updated and expanded two-volume second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Civil War relates the history of this war through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on persons, places, events, institutions, battles, and campaigns. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil War.

A fascinating reevaluation of U.S. literary realism during the Gilded Age.

Loyal Subjects considers how the Civil War complicated the cultural value of emotion, especially the ideal of sympathy.

In Against the Gallows, Paul Christian Jones explores the intriguing cooperation of America’s writers—including major figures such as Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Herman Melville—with reformers, politicians, clergymen, and periodical editors who attempted to end the practice of capital punishment in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. In an age of passionate reform efforts, the antigallows movement enjoyed broad popularity, waging its campaign in legislatures, pulpits, newspapers, and literary journals. Although it failed in its ultimate goal of ending hangings across the United States, the movement did achieve various improvements in the practices of the justice system, including reducing the number of capital crimes, eliminating public executions in most northern states, and abolishing capital punishment completely in three states. Although a few historians have studied the antebellum movement against capital punishment, until now very little attention has been paid to the role of America’s writers in these efforts. Jones’s study recovers the relationship between the nation’s literary figures and the movement against the death penalty, illustrating that the editors of literary journals actively encouraged and published antigallows writing, that popular crime novelists created a sympathy toward criminals that led readers to question the state’s justifications for capital punishment, that poets crafted verse that advocated strongly for Christian sympathy for criminals that coincided with an antipathy to the death penalty, and that female sentimental writers fashioned melodramatic narratives that illustrated the injustice of the hanging and reimagined the justice system itself as a sympathetic subject capable of incorporating compassion into its workings and seeing reform rather than revenge as its ends.

Most observers and historians rarely acknowledge the history of civil rights predating the twentieth-century. The book Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era pays significant scholarly attention to the intellectual ferment—legal and political—of the nineteenth-century by tracing the history of black Americans’ civil rights to the postbellum era. By revisiting its faulty foundational history, this book lends itself to show that, after emancipation, national and local struggles for racial equality had led to the encoding of racism in the political order in the American South and the proliferation of racism as an American institution.Vanessa Holloway draws upon a host of historical, legal, and philosophical studies as well as legislative histories to construct a coherent theory of the law’s relevance to the era, questioning how the nexus of race and politics should be interpreted during Reconstruction. Anchored in the Reconstruction Amendments, Supreme Court decisions and landmark statutes of the 1860s and 1870s—the Black Codes, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts, the Enforcement Acts, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875—Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era offers a new perspective on the political history of law between the years 1865 and 1877. It is predominant in the ongoing debates on social justice and racial inequality.