Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter S. Carmichael looks clos

For all that has been written about the Civil War's impact on the urban northeast and southern home fronts, we have until now lacked a detailed picture of how i

Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were a people with boundless energy capable of heroic deeds, monumental achievements, and tragic error

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship

More than 60,000 books have been published on the Civil War. Most Americans, though, get their ideas about the war--why it was fought, what was won, what was lo