The Civil War marked a significant turning point in American history -- not only for the United States itself but also for its relations with foreign powers both during and after the conflict. The ...friendship and foreign policy partnership between President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Henry Seward shaped those US foreign policies. These unlikely allies, who began as rivals during the 1860 presidential nomination, helped ensure that America remained united and prospered in the aftermath of the nation's consuming war.
InLincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, Joseph A. Fry examines the foreign policy decisions that resulted from this partnership and the legacy of those decisions. Lincoln and Seward, despite differences in upbringing, personality, and social status, both adamantly believed in the preservation of the union and the need to stymie slavery. They made that conviction the cornerstone of their policies abroad, and through those policies, such as Seward threatening war with any nation that intervened in the Civil War, they prevented European intervention that could have led to Northern defeat. The Union victory allowed America to resume imperial expansion, a dynamic that Seward sustained beyond Lincoln's death during his tenure as President Andrew Johnson's Secretary of State.
Fry's analysis of the Civil War from an international perspective and the legacy of US policy decisions provides a more complete view of the war and a deeper understanding of this crucial juncture in American history.
At its core, the Civil War was a conflict over the meaning of citizenship. Most famously, it became a struggle over whether or not to grant rights to a group that stood outside the pale of ...civil-society: African Americans. But other groups--namely Jews, Germans, the Irish, and Native Americans--also became part of this struggle to exercise rights stripped from them by legislation, court rulings, and the prejudices that defined the age.Grounded in extensive research by experts in their respective fields, Civil War Citizens is the first volume to collectively analyze the wartime experiences of those who lived outside the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizenry of nineteenth-century America. The essays examine the momentous decisions made by these communities in the face of war, their desire for full citizenship, the complex loyalties that shaped their actions, and the inspiring and heartbreaking results of their choices-- choices that still echo through the United States today. Contributors: Stephen D. Engle, William McKee Evans, David T. Gleeson, Andrea Mehrlnder, Joseph P. Reidy, Robert N. Rosen, and Susannah J. Ural.
Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ...ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people-white women and slaves-and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.
This social and cultural history of Civil War medicine and science sheds important light on the question of why and how anti-Black racism survived the destruction of slavery. During the war, white ...Northerners promoted ideas about Black inferiority under the guise of medical and scientific authority. In particular, the Sanitary Commission and Army medical personnel conducted wartime research aimed at proving Black medical and biological inferiority. They not only subjected Black soldiers and refugees from slavery to substandard health care but also scrutinized them as objects of study. This mistreatment of Black soldiers and civilians extended after life to include dissection, dismemberment, and disposal of the Black war dead in unmarked or mass graves and medical waste pits. Simultaneously, white medical and scientific investigators enhanced their professional standing by establishing their authority on the science of racial difference and hierarchy. Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, recollections of Civil War soldiers and medical workers, and testimonies from Black Americans, Leslie A. Schwalm exposes the racist ideas and practices that shaped wartime medicine and science. Painstakingly researched and accessibly written, this book helps readers understand the persistence of anti-Black racism and health disparities during and after the war.
Heroes and cowards Costa, Dora L; Costa, Dora L; Kahn, Matthew E
2010., 20100902, 2010, 2008, 2009-01-01, 20080101
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When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse ...community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war.
Drawing information from government documents, soldiers' journals, and one of the most extensive research projects about Union Army soldiers ever undertaken,Heroes and Cowardsdemonstrates the role that social capital plays in people's decisions. The makeup of various companies--whether soldiers were of the same ethnicity, age, and occupation--influenced whether soldiers remained loyal or whether they deserted. Costa and Kahn discuss how the soldiers benefited from friendships, what social factors allowed some to survive the POW camps while others died, and how punishments meted out for breaking codes of conduct affected men after the war. The book also examines the experience of African-American soldiers and makes important observations about how their comrades shaped their lives.
Heroes and Cowardshighlights the inherent tensions between the costs and benefits of community diversity, shedding light on how groups and societies behave and providing valuable lessons for the present day.
The Cacophony of Politics charts the trajectory of the
Democratic Party as the party of opposition in the North during the
Civil War. A comprehensive overview, this book reveals the myriad
...complications and contingencies of political life in the Northern
states and explains the objectives of the nearly half of eligible
Northern voters who cast a ballot against Abraham Lincoln in
1864.
The party's famous slogan "The Union as it was, the Constitution
as it is" was meant to have broad appeal and promote solidarity
among Northern Democrats by invoking their core ideological
commitments to nationalism, law and order, tradition, and strict
construction. But, as J. Matthew Gallman shows, the slogan was a
poor reflection of the volatile, fluid, messy, and improvisational
reality of political life for men and women, across the public and
private spheres. Democrats experienced the war as a cascading
series of dilemmas, for which their slogan did not always offer
guidance or resolution. Offering a definitive account of the
Democratic Party in the North, The Cacophony of Politics
shows the limits of ideology and the ways the Civil War-and the
nature of nineteenth-century political culture-confounded the
Democrats' self-image and exacerbated their divisions, especially
over the central issue of slavery.
A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era
This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' ...wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. Brown provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.
Abraham Lincoln, an American icon, was feared and hated during his presidency as a brutal dictator. His severe attacks on New York, Maryland, Indiana and Missouri show that he was turning the United ...States into a permanently militarized nation.In these pages John Chodes exposes a shocking and criminal campaign against the people of New York, Maryland, Indiana and Missouri during the Civil War, events most of us have never heard of.
