Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

of George C. Rable’s Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), a collection of essays edited by Catharine Clinton and Nina Silber that offers explorations of childhood, spies, nurses, divorce, and even illicit sex, LeeAnn Whites’s The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), and Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Following hard on their heels have been numerous studies of gender—LeeAnn Whites’s Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Silber and Clinton’s Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Nina Silber’s Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Tracy J. Revels’s Grander in Her Daughters: Florida’s Women During the Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), Anya Jabour’s Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), Victoria Ott’s Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), and Nina Silber’s Gender and the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)—as well as editions of women’s diaries and letters.

The overall disruption of Southern communities has been the focus of some of the best social histories of the Civil War, beginning with Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) on Washington County, North Carolina, and Daniel Sutherland on Culpeper County, Virginia, in Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995). More recently, Anne Bailey has given us Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), a study of ethnic diversity and conflict in a Southern state that was supposed to have neither, while A. Wilson Greene has focused on one city in Virginia in Civil War Petersburg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). For the Appalachians, there is Brian D. McKnight’s Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006) and Jonathan Dean Sarris’s A Separate Civil War: Conflict and Community in the North Georgia Mountains (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

American culture in the Civil War era and afterward has been surveyed in Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Louise A. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Cultures, 1860–1880 (Boston: Twayne, 1991), although Stevenson devotes most of her book to the post–Civil War decades. The intellectual life of mid-nineteenth-century America can be best understood through Bruce Kuklick’s Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). D. H. Meyer’s The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972) offers a vital anatomy of the central concern of nineteenth-century American philosophy. George M. Fredrickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) is still the prevailing interpretation of Northern intellectuals in interpreting the Civil War, but because he focuses exclusively on the secular intellectuals and the Romantic religionists, the record that emerges from his book is quite a dismal one, with Northern intellectuals being long on fears for social control and remarkably short on intellectual substance. James Moorhead’s American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978) helps to correct the sense of imbalance induced by Fredrickson’s book, but even so, Moorhead is more concerned with millenialism than with the larger picture of evangelical Protestants in the Civil War. Confederate intellectual life has, by contrast, enjoyed an overflow of outstanding studies, starting with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese’s The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Michael O’Brien’s twovolume opus, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Michael Bernath’s Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and three shorter books, by E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentleman Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), and Eugene Genovese, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). Two ambitious surveys of religion in the Civil War North and South are Harry S. Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006) and George C. Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). But the most incisive and rewarding analysis of religious thought during and about the war is Mark A. Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Louis A. Warren’s Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration: “A New Birth of Freedom” (Fort Wayne, IN: Lincoln National Life Foundation, 1964) offers a conventional but detailed history of the writing of the Address and its subsequent reputation.

TEN. STALEMATE AND TRIUMPH

The arrival of Ulysses S. Grant to assume practical control of the war in Virginia marked a critical turning point in the military history of the Civil War. The long and bloody Overland Campaign that Grant waged against Lee