front cover of Make Way for Liberty
Make Way for Liberty
Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War
Jeff Kannel
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020
Hundreds of African American soldiers and regimental employees represented Wisconsin in the Civil War, and many of them lived in the state either before or after the conflict. And yet, if these individuals are mentioned at all in histories of the state, it is with a sentence or two about their small numbers, or the belief that they all were from slaveholding states and served as substitutes for Wisconsin draftees.  Relative to the total number of Badgers who served in the Civil War, African Americans soldiers were few, but they constituted a significant number in at least five regiments of the United States Colored Infantry and several other companies. Their lives before and after the war in rural communities, small towns, and cities form an enlightening story of acceptance and respect for their service but rejection and discrimination based on their race. Make Way for Liberty will bring clarity to the questions of how many African Americans represented Wisconsin during the conflict, who among them lived in the state before and after the war, and their impact on their communities
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Making Photography Matter
A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression
Cara Finnegan
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Photography became a dominant medium in cultural life starting in the late nineteenth century. As it happened, viewers increasingly used their reactions to photographs to comment on and debate public issues as vital as war, national identity, and citizenship.
 
Cara A. Finnegan analyzes a wealth of newspaper and magazine articles, letters to the editor, trial testimony, books, and speeches produced by viewers in response to specific photos they encountered in public. From the portrait of a young Lincoln to images of child laborers and Depression-era hardship, Finnegan treats the photograph as a locus for viewer engagement and constructs a history of photography's viewers that shows how Americans used words about images to participate in the politics of their day. As she shows, encounters with photography helped viewers negotiate the emergent anxieties and crises of U.S. public life through not only persuasion but action, as well.
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Man’s Better Angels
Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War
Philip F. Gura
Harvard University Press, 2017

Banks failed, credit contracted, inequality grew, and people everywhere were out of work while political paralysis and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. As financial crises always have, the Panic of 1837 drew forth a plethora of reformers who promised to restore America to greatness. Animated by an ethic of individualism and self-reliance, they became prophets of a new moral order: if only their fellow countrymen would call on each individual’s God-given better instincts, the most intractable problems could be resolved.

Inspired by this reformist fervor, Americans took to strict dieting, water cures, phrenology readings, mesmerism, utopian communities, free love, mutual banking, and a host of other elaborate self-improvement schemes. Vocal activists were certain that solutions to the country’s ills started with the reformation of individuals, and through them communities, and through communities the nation. This set of assumptions ignored the hard political and economic realities at the core of the country’s malaise, however, and did nothing to prevent another financial panic twenty years later, followed by secession and civil war.

Focusing on seven individuals—George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry David Thoreau, and John Brown—Philip Gura explores their efforts, from the comical to the homicidal, to beat a new path to prosperity. A narrative of people and ideas, Man’s Better Angels captures an intellectual moment in American history that has been overshadowed by the Civil War and the pragmatism that arose in its wake.

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Massachusetts and the Civil War
The Commonwealth and National Disunion
Matthew Mason
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
All states are not created equal, at least not when it comes to their influence on American history. That assumption underlies Massachusetts and the Civil War. The volume's ten essays coalesce around the national significance of Massachusetts through the Civil War era, the ways in which the commonwealth reflected and even modeled the Union's precarious but real wartime unification, and the Bay State's postwar return to the schisms that predated the war. Rather than attempting to summarize every aspect of the state's contribution to the wartime Union, the collection focuses on what was distinctive about its influence during the great crisis of national unity.

In the first section, "The Opposition to Slavery," essays by John Stauffer, Dean Grodzins, Peter Wirzbicki, and Richard S. Newman demonstrate the central role Massachusetts played in the rise of both the antislavery movement and abolitionism. They show how slavery's foes united, planned, and understood their cause, and how they envisioned a postwar nation free of servitude. In the second section, "The War Years," Matthew Mason, Carol Bundy, and Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray investigate how the exigencies of war unified the commonwealth across party lines and over the distance between home and the front. In the final section, "Reconciliation," Sarah J. Purcell, Amy Morsman, and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai probe postwar efforts to recover from the war's profound disruptions.
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Memoirs of the Civil War
Between the Northern and Southern Sections of the United States of America 1861 to 1865
William W. Chamberlaine
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Contains much valuable information and engaging narrative passages

Memoirs of the Civil War, though relatively little known because of its rarity in the original edition, contains much valuable information and engaging narrative passages. A Virginian whose Confederate career included service in an infantry regiment early in the war, Chamberlaine’s most important military service was as a staff officer attached to Brigadier General Reuben Lindsay Walker, who commanded the Third Corps artillery in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Includes excellent material on the duties of staff officers, operation of Confederate conscription, and the role of artillery in Lee’s campaigns. He is especially eloquent and revealing about a number of famous battles: the Seven Days; Antietam, where Chamberlaine distinguished himself and was wounded; and the Wilderness, where he had a memorable encounter with Lee.
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Michigan's Company K
Anishinaabe Soldiers, Citizenship, and the Civil War
Michelle K Cassidy
Michigan State University Press, 2023
As much as the Civil War was a battle over the survival of the United States, for the men of Company K of the First Michigan Sharpshooters, it was also one battle in a longer struggle for the survival of Anishinaabewaki, the homelands of the Anishinaabeg—Ojibwe, Odawa, and Boodewaadamii peoples . The men who served in what was often called ‘the Indian Company’ chose to enlist in the Union army to contribute to their peoples’ ongoing struggle with the state and federal governments over status, rights, resources, and land in the Great Lakes. This meticulously researched history begins in 1763 with Pontiac’s War, a key moment in Anishinaabe history. It then explores the multiple strategies the Anishinaabeg deployed to remain in Michigan despite federal pressure to leave. Anishinaabe men claimed the rights and responsibilities associated with male citizenship—voting, owning land, and serving in the army—while actively preserving their status as ‘Indians’ and Anishinaabe peoples. Indigenous expectations of the federal government, as well as religious and social networks, shaped individuals’ decisions to join the U.S. military. The stories of Company K men also broaden our understanding of the complex experiences of Civil War soldiers. In their fight against removal, dispossession, political marginalization, and loss of resources in the Great Lakes, the Anishinaabeg participated in state and national debates over citizenship, allegiance, military service, and the government’s responsibilities to veterans and their families.
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Military Prisons of the Civil War
A Comparative Study
David L. Keller
Westholme Publishing, 2021
A Fresh Analysis of the First Large-Scale Imprisonment of Soldiers in Wartime and Its Failures 
Over the course of the American Civil War, more than four hundred thousand prisoners were taken by the North and South combined—the largest number in any conflict up to that time, and nearly fifty-eight thousand of these men died while incarcerated or soon after being released. Neither side expected to take so many prisoners in the wake of battles and neither had any experience on how to deal with such large numbers. Prison camps were quickly established, and as the war progressed, reports of sickness, starvation, mistreatment by guards, and other horrors circulated in the press. After the war, recriminations were leveled on both sides, and much of the immediate ill-will between the North and South dealt with prisoners and their treatment. 
    In Military Prisons of the Civil War: A Comparative Analysis historic preservationist David L. Keller consulted official records, newspaper reports, first-person accounts from prisoners, and other primary source material in order to understand why imprisonment during the Civil War failed on both sides. His research identifies five factors shared among both Union and Confederate prisons that led to so many deaths, including the lack of a strategic plan on either side for handling prisoners, inadequate plans for holding prisoners for long periods of time, and poor selection and training of camp command and guards. 
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My Father's Name
A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War
Lawrence P. Jackson
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Armed with only early boyhood memories, Lawrence P. Jackson begins his quest by setting out from his home in Baltimore for Pittsylvania County, Virginia, to try to find his late grandfather’s old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs. My Father’s Name tells the tale of the ensuing journey, at once a detective story and a moving historical memoir, uncovering the mixture of anguish and fulfillment that accompanies a venture into the ancestral past, specifically one tied to the history of slavery.
After asking around in Pittsylvania County and carefully putting the pieces together, Jackson finds himself in the house of distant relations. In the pages that follow, he becomes increasingly absorbed by the search for his ancestors and increasingly aware of how few generations an African American needs to map back in order to arrive at slavery, “a door of no return.” Ultimately, Jackson’s dogged research in libraries, census records, and courthouse registries enables him to trace his family to his grandfather’s grandfather, a man who was born or sold into slavery but who, when Federal troops abandoned the South in 1877, was able to buy forty acres of land. In this intimate study of a black Virginia family and neighborhood, Jackson vividly reconstructs moments in the lives of his father’s grandfather, Edward Jackson, and great-grandfather, Granville Hundley, and gives life to revealing narratives of Pittsylvania County, recalling both the horror of slavery and the later struggles of postbellum freedom.
My Father’s Name is a family story full of twists and turns—and one of haunting familiarity to many Americans, who may question whether the promises of emancipation have ever truly been fulfilled. It is also a resolute look at the duties that come with reclaiming and honoring Americans who survived slavery and a thoughtful meditation on its painful and enduring history.
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