Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that historian Benson J. Lossing did more than any other man to make history interesting and popular. Lossing wrote his comprehensive three-volume history of the Civil War at a time when the facts were still fresh. Originally published in 1866, Volume One covers the period from the political conventions held in the spring of 1860 to midsummer 1861 and the Battle of Bull Run. Lossing accompanies his narratives of marches, battles, and sieges with maps and plans, includes biographical sketches of the prominent people from both sides of the conflict, and illustrates his history with hundreds of drawings and engravings by the author and others.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1892.

The essays and talks gathered in Past Imperfect cover a broad range of topics of continuing relevance to the humanities and to scholarship in general. Part I collects Towner's historical essays on the indentured servants, apprentices, and slaves of colonial New England that are standards of the "new social history." The pieces in Part II express his vision of the library as an institution for research and education; here he discusses the rationale for the creation of research centers, the Newberry's pioneering policies for conservation and preservation, and the ways in which collections were built. In Part III Towner writes revealingly of his co-workers and mentors. Part IV assembles his statements as "spokesman for the humanities," addressing questions of national priorities in funding, and of so-called elitist scholarship versus public programs.

What happens if we reconsider the literature of the Civil War North in light of the transformation of the federal state's power? While literary scholarship about the Civil War has more generally focused on the rise of wartime nationalism, Philip Gould looks particularly at how literary works engage the subjects of censorship, propaganda, and the reconfigured meanings of "loyalty" and "treason" at a time of political crisis. During the war the Lincoln Administration shut down opposition newspapers and curtailed free expression and civil liberties protected by the US Constitution. Lincoln also suspended the writ of habeas corpus to deal with political dissenters and try to control public opinion. Early in the war, he coined the phrase "war power" to describe the (presumed) powers to address this crisis; his policies became controversial throughout the conflict. War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North considers literary production in this "total war" that radically changed the federal government's (and its military's) relation to traditional norms and spaces of private, domestic, and social life. Each chapter focuses on a major writer in the Civil War North's engagement with questions of identity, affect, and affiliation: Could one love the Union as one loved home and family? What were the implications for literary expression in the midst of a political culture being reshaped by censorship and propaganda? The final two chapters address the role and plight of African Americans in the Civil War and its aftermath, focusing particularly on African American military service as the supposed means by which racially disenfranchised Americans might become citizens.