Book Reviews 179 These beliefs, as well as the tendency of war to blur the lines between right and wrong, led officers and their troops to commit a number of minor and major offenses. These included soliciting prostitutes, firing weapons without cause, deserting, fistfights, gambling, theft, murder, straggling, mutiny, general insubordination, and so forth. The problems proved to be so numerous that the army could not completely eliminate any of these offenses, and had to settle for attempting to reduce or manage them. Executing or removing soldiers who broke the rules would have depleted the Union force to a debilitating degree. Fortunately for the army and its troops, the process for courts-martial proved to be flexible, allowing judges to consider special circumstances, as well as providing punishments that did not include discharging miscreants from the army. It is astonishing that the Union army was able to create a force of men who were willing to risk their lives, even though they often refused to submit to the authority of their officers. In Baring the Iron Hand, Ramold has created a necessary study, with a well-supported argument, on the state of discipline in a Civil War army. Furthermore, he does this with some flare, ingeniously weaving intriguing and humorous quotations throughout the work. This reader found much joy in discovering the great number of asinine things done by bored or irritated soldiers during the war. The book is engaging, and the reader will not want to put it down. Possibly the only negative detail is that there are some typos in the text. However, these errors are probably not the author’s fault, and the content and story do not suffer because of them. Anyone interested in the inner workings of a nineteenth-century nonprofessional army should definitely consult this meaty volume. Christopher R. Mortenson Ouachita Baptist University Thomas J. Sugrue. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008. Pp. 688. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $35.00. There was a time, not so long ago, when civil rights history was essentially a subset of southern history. Other than acknowledging that some white Northerners felt threatened by the post-1914 Great Migration to urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest, historians of 180 Michigan Historical Review the African American freedom struggle rarely strayed north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The great drama of liberation, they assumed, took place in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, or perhaps in Virginia and the Carolinas, not in places like Michigan or Illinois or New York. How naïve and limiting this view seems now in light of the illuminating work of Thomas Sugrue and others. Sugrue’s first book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996), explored the connections among race, poverty, and urban blight in a single city, beginning with industrial expansion during World War II and ending with the Detroit race riot of 1967. In Sweet Land of Liberty, Sugrue widens his vision temporally and spatially to include a half-century of civil rights struggles in the North, from the Klan-infested 1920s to the Carter administration of the late 1970s. With meticulous attention to detail and extraordinary interpretive skill, he presents a sweeping narrative of interrelated stories, both individual and collective, that outline and explain regional patterns of success and failure. From Garveyism to Black Power, movements to gain freedom, equality, and opportunity in northern communities bumped up against formidable barriers, both informal and institutional. Although civil rights activists sometimes took advantage of the fluid nature of economic and social life in the urban North, the parameters of the struggle were never quite as clear as they were in the Jim Crow South. Despite wideranging efforts to organize and mobilize mass opposition to discrimination, improvement in living conditions tended to be slow and halting, with few clear or complete victories over discrimination. Sugrue not only tells this complicated tale with honesty and clarity, but he also enlivens the human element of the story with narrative drive and deft characterizations of a fascinating array of activists. From the crusading churchwoman Anna Arnold Hedgman of the 1920s...