History Of Civil War Research Articles

ВАРИАЦИЯ К ДОСТОЕВСКОМУ? РОМАН И. ЭРЕНБУРГА "ХУЛИО ХУРЕНИТО"

Julio Jurenito – a 1924 Modernist novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, written hot on the heels of the 1917 Revolution and is distinguished by both a wide intertextual spectrum and an acute satirical orientation in relation to all ideological trends and factions. The article focuses on references of the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg to the legacy of Dostoevsky – primarily – The Brothers Karamazov. Ilya Ehrenburg resets Dostoevsky’s features – his protagonists and some elements of plot – into the reality of European history of the First World War, Russian Revolution and Civil War. But also, Ehrenburg goes beyond Dostoevsky’s semantic continuum, replacing the author’s sense of History as a process striving for its endpoint with a History in which an end is fundamentally impossible, and there is always at least the potential to put the flow of event on pause and rewrite their mistakes. As well, the idea important for Dostoevsky that of the moral damage of the modern atheist-minded person is transformed into a demonstration of the people’s inclination to create idols and devoutly worship the latter. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel is grounded on an interpretation of Dostoevsky, perfected through the prism of the traditions of the Jewish Enlightenment.

An Environmental History of the Civil War by Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver

Reviewed by: An Environmental History of the Civil War by Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver Lindsay Rae Privette (bio) An Environmental History of the Civil War. By Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 261. Cloth, $30.00.) Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s An Environmental History of the Civil War is the latest work to challenge the traditional narrative of Civil War history. Scholars have typically downplayed the environment’s [End Page 116] influence on the war, opting instead to focus on the stories of people. After all, it was people who fought in battle, who suffered on the home front, and who struggled for their freedom. And yet people are only part of the story. Humans are vulnerable to their environment. This was certainly the case during the Civil War, when environmental factors regularly dictated troop movements, supplied food for marching armies, and altered soldiers’ health. Recognizing this, Browning and Silver broaden the traditional narrative by treating the war as “an ecological event that not only affected people but also altered natural systems and reshaped the already complex interaction between humans, other organisms, and the physical environment” (4). Browning and Silver are not the first historians to merge the fields of Civil War and environmental history. Over the past ten years, a number of works have highlighted the relationship between the war and the natural world. Lisa M. Brady’s War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (2012) examines the connection between military strategy and popular conceptions of the land, while Kathryn Shively Meier’s Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (2013) investigates the environment’s impact on soldiers’ health. Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (2018) exposes the war as an ecological disaster that had lasting implications for southern agriculture, and Joan E. Cashin’s War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018) emphasizes how soldiers and civilians competed over the same environmental resources. Yet, with a growing historiography of environmental studies of the Civil War, Browning and Silver observe that “we still lack a work that considers the four years of war—the musters, training, troop movements, battles, home front, and aftermath— in an environmental context” (4). Their book is therefore unique because in it they seek to unite all these discussions. In doing so, Browning and Silver have produced a study that “reimagine[s] the war, not just as a military action but also as a biotic or biological event, one crucial to the history of the American environment” (4). An Environmental History of the Civil War is divided into six chapters that move through the war both chronologically and thematically. Browning and Silver begin their study in the spring of 1861 with the rapid recruitment, training, and deployment of soldiers into the field. These actions led not only to a transient population, but also to overcrowded camps where vulnerable bodies came into contact with new microbes, viruses, and bacteria. Next, the authors explore the weather. By contextualizing the war [End Page 117] within broader weather patterns, Browning and Silver reveal that the Civil War occurred during a protracted time of La Niña, which created warm, dry conditions over most of the North American continent. The notable exception was during the winter of 1861 through the spring of 1862, when abnormal rainfall left soldiers in Virginia, Tennessee, and California navigating floodwaters and floundering in the mud. Browning and Silver aptly demonstrate that weather not only affected troop movements, but also undermined soldiers’ health through exposure, nutritional deficiencies, and unclean water. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on the environmental struggles that resulted from gathering and moving large numbers of men and animals. The land bore responsibility for providing enough food and water to sustain both armies. But while food production skyrocketed in the North, it dwindled in the South owing to loss of labor, lack of agricultural diversity, and the Union army’s evolving hard-war policy. Additionally, men and animals produced...

Иркутяне Серебренниковы и русская наука в Тяньцзине

This publication is dedicated to the Russian China Studies in Tianjin by Ivan Innokent’evich Serebrennikov (1882–1953, Tianjin, China) and his wife, Alexandra Nikolaevna (1883 – 1975, San Francisco, USA), who left considerable traces in the literary life of Russian China. He was an active member of the East-Siberian department of the Russian Geographical Society, the secretor of the City of Irkutsk Duma, the minister in the Siberia Government and in A. Kolchak’s Government. His wife graduated from the Irkutsk women’s high school, worked for the “Sibir” newspaper, after the February revolt she was elected as a deputy for the City of Irkutsk Duma. Ivan Serebrennikov and his wife arrived in Harbin in March 1920 intending to go in for literature, researches, studying China. He published some historical works on the civil war history alongside with his memoirs. That period his diaries were not regular, he made notes but occasionally. The obvious reason for that was the spouses didn’t know where to live. In spring 1922 having come to Tianjin both Serebrennikovs started teaching. A. Serebrennikova worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature, she also did lecturing and published her articles in some periodicals. Since 1937 she had been busy with translating Chinese poetry from English into Russian using British editions. The main interests of I. Serebrennikov were in history and orient studies. He analyzed the political and economic situation, prepared materials for American scholars. Some of them – Harold H. Fisher (Stanford Univ., Hoover Inst.), Charles P. Howland (Yale Univ.) – used Serebrennikov’s analyses in their researches. But the main I. Serebrennikov’s work is his diaries which remain unpublished up to now. Since 1931 he had made his notes daily – at first with a straight and beautiful handwriting. Then, after he had got a stroke, the letters became uneven and looked like unreadable signs. At last his wife wrote for him under his dictating. The diaries keep the evidence of many events, such as the civil war in Russia and the beginning of communists’ regime, ethnical conflicts in China, the influence of Japan, USA and other countries. Also, in this article the oriental journal “Vestnik Azii Herald of China” is described.

«…ПАРОВОЗЫ ЗАМЕРЗНУТ, НАДВИГАЕТСЯ ГОЛОД, ПОЯВИЛСЯ СЫПНЯК…»: ЖЕЛЕЗНЫЕ ДОРОГИ ВЕЛИКОГО СИБИРСКОГО ПОХОДА: 1919–1920 ГГ.

The publication of documentary materials reflects the history of the organization and conducting of the retreat of the units of Admiral A.V. Kolchak’s Eastern Front and the evacuation of civilian refugees from Omsk and other cities in Siberia in November 1919 – January 1920. The article considers the issues of the technical condition and operation of the TRANSSiberian railway and, in particular, the functioning of the rolling stock. Those aspects for the history of the Civil War in the East of Russia to this day remain poorly studied. Evidence is provided on the state of the military, refugee and civil trains, and about the situation of passengers. Consistently and with the involvement of documentary material, the stages of the preparation and implementation of evacuation measures are described, and the reasons for the failure of planned decisions are analyzed. The article presents evidence on the consequences of full-scale disaster with the railway accident that became part of the Civil War history in Siberia. The materials from the State Archives of the Russian Federation that have not been widely used in scientific research and have not been published yet, as well as some previously published documentary evidence, were used. The study of that aspect of the Civil War history in Siberia allows to get an idea of not only the military, but also of the political importance that the TRANS-Siberian railway played in the absence of developed transport communications in the East of Russia.

Joan E. Cashin. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War; Erin Stewart Mauldin. Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South.

J<scp>oan</scp> E. C<scp>ashin</scp>. <i>War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War</i>; E<scp>rin</scp> S<scp>tewart</scp> M<scp>auldin</scp>. <i>Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South</i>.

Kalmyk Division and its Place in the Numbering of Cavalry Units of the Red Army in 1918–1919

Despite the great number of works on the history of the Civil War, the history of the military units of the Red Army during the first years of its establishment still has not been thoroughly investigated. The list of the Red Army formations including cavalry units is still not complete. One of the ways to detect cavalry divisions, scheduled for formation, is numbering analysis which was open-type and solid and was maintained in the specific recording system. The analysis showed that among the units formed in 1918–1919 there was the Kalmyk cavalry division that drew special attention of the central military authorities headed by People’s Commissar L. D. Trotskiy due to the fact that Kalmyks were born horsemen and could quickly master cavalry service.

Civil War Literature and the News

In the 1987 preface to a new edition of The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), Daniel Aaron reflects on the “still elusive, still unfolding” nature of his subject. Given how “pliable historical and literary ‘evidence’ can be,” he concludes, “new writing about the Civil War era” illustrates, even more than with other historical inquiries, how the “shocks and disorders” of critics’ own times influence the versions of the past they present to their readers (xvi). One way we might understand Aaron’s point is as a more or less humdrum truism: that, whether or not historians embrace modes of presentism in their scholarship, current events will revivify topics that previous generations have left unexplored. However, when Aaron elaborates that the Civil War “remains … a live volcano, a Rorschach test often more revelatory of the perceiver than what is being perceived,” he suggests that there’s something exceptionally pressing about Civil War history. Studying the Civil War in particular, he intimates, turns us into what Jeffrey Insko, in his study of abolitionist historiography, terms “Romantic presentists,” hailing us into a vision of “history as an always-unfinished activity happening now and remaking—as opposed to trying to know—then” (5, 6).

Afghanistan Civil War In “Kite Runner” Novel By Khaled Husseini; Historical Approacha

This journal point on the analysis of history in “Kite Runner” novel by Khaled Hosseini in 2003. Many countries ever happened civil war, then the author pour it into literary work, it likes Afghanistan civil war in this novel. The story in this novel told about the beauty of Kabul was replaced by disturbance of the conflict that destroyed Afghanistan. Furthermore, the object of the research is history of Afghanistan civil war in “Kita Runner” novel by Hosseini in 2003 viewed from H. A. Taine phrase. As basic concept and framework thinking, the researcher used elements of race, milieu and moment from historical approach purposed by Taine in Guerin et al (2005). Qualitative descriptive method used as method presenting result, also used primary and secondary data as method to collect data. The researcher found that Afghanistan civil war in this novel is real history occurred in Afghanistan from 1978 until present. From the analysis, it can be concluded the novel of “Kita Runner” by Khaled Hosseini in 2003 is compatible to analyze by used historical approach.

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South. By Erin Stewart Mauldin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $35.00, e-book $23.99.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South. By Erin Stewart Mauldin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $35.00, e-book $23.99.Jim DownsJim Downs Connecticut College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 25, Number 2April 2020 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 20Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz106 Views: 20Total views on this site HistoryPublished online February 27, 2020 © 2020 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

POLITICAL WORK IN THE SOUTHERN FRONT MILITARY FORCES THROUGHOUT THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR (1918-1920)

Purpose of the study: Recreation of a historically truthful picture, reflecting the role of educational work in the army during the Civil War (1918-1920), which currently continues to be the subject of sharp ideological and scientific discussions. Introduction of previously unknown to the scientific community documents concerning political work in the troops. Generalization of the experience of this work with the aim of shaping the scientific historical consciousness among young people in the context of the modern information struggle.&#x0D; Methodology: The conceptual basis for the study relies on the integral paradigm of historical analysis (introduced by the representatives of the RSSU historical school). It allows not only to compare polar versions of the description of the key problems of the Civil War history to create a multidimensional historical panorama but also to find a consensus between the methodological concepts that guided the development of the national historical science in the Soviet period and the modern paradigms of historical knowledge.&#x0D; Main Findings: 1. The experience of the activities of the political bodies of the Southern Front related educational work in troops during the Civil War has been considered in order to preserve historical heritage. 2. New archival documents, including leaflets that determine the scientific argumentation of the problem, as well as new concepts (“integral paradigm of historical analysis” and “cultural-historiographic space”) have been introduced into the scientific circulation. 3. The main approaches to assessing the events of the Civil War have been defined.&#x0D; Applications of this study: The study can be used in the implementation of various educational programs and projects, scientific and methodological research of problems of national history, as well as training and professional retraining of specialists in the field of history teaching.&#x0D; Novelty/Originality of this study: A holistic picture of the activities of the Red Army political agencies in carrying out party political work in the troops of the Southern Front during the Civil War has been presented. The main forms of cultural, educational and propaganda work carried out among the frontline troops and the enemy forces have been analyzed. An assessment of the effectiveness of the mass political work in the creation and strengthening of the Red Army during the period under study has been given.

France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History by Stève Sainlaude

Reviewed by: France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History by Stève Sainlaude David Brown (bio) France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History. By Stève Sainlaude. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 285. $45.00 cloth) The internationalization of the study of the American Civil War shows no sign of slowing. The field took a transatlantic approach in the 1920s, in major works by Ephraim Adams and Frank Owsley among others, that broadened into consideration of the wider European response. Nowadays, culture and ideology are as important as foreign policy and trade. This wide purview is welcome but Stève Sainlaude, associate professor of history at the University of Paris IV Sorbonne, reminds us that there is much still to be learned about traditional Civil War diplomacy in a country where it might be thought there was little left to be discovered. Sainlaude’s revisionist interpretation of Franco-U.S. relations, based on two monographs previously published in French, will become the standard account for years to come. It is remarkable that no historian has until now examined the full range of diplomatic records generated by the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay, especially the bird’s-eye view provided by consuls in the U.S., but Civil War historians will be thankful for Sainlaude’s diligence. [End Page 519] France and the American Civil War is divided into three sections. The first considers French responses to the war and the diplomatic and legal problems that it caused. It probes conversations with Great Britain regarding the blockade, intervention, and shipbuilding but concludes that the U.S. conflict “was not a priority” because both countries faced “more pressing concerns in the European theater” (p. 71). The second considers the political, cultural, and ideological ties between the American South and France, intervention in Mexico, and shifting attitudes toward the Confederacy during the war. It argues that slavery was not particularly significant to French thinking, a position at odds with the existing historiography which contends French liberals were strongly antislavery. Confederate emissaries in Paris, such as John Slidell, gained a reputation as “staunch expansion-ists” that did little to further their case for recognition (p. 124). The final section concentrates on relations with the Union. Like most Europeans, the French were unsure that the Union would endure and there were extended discussions over different kinds of future relations. As in the British case, however, the cotton famine was not as disruptive as feared at the beginning of the war. Other parts of the economy thrived in part to compensate for the downturn in textiles and the unemployed found work in other industries. Historians will learn much that is new in this book, particularly about French diplomacy at home and abroad, French public opinion, the effects of war on the French economy, as well as familiar episodes such as Mexican intervention. Sainlaude confirms that Napoleon was far more favourable to the Confederacy than the Union. Indeed, he believed that his “Grand Design” to check the spread of Anglo-Saxonism was well served by the breakup of the United States. However, Napoleon’s support for the Confederacy was rash and failed to deliver. This was not because he believed British cooperation was essential to intervention—one of this book’s major arguments is that French plans were far less dependent on the British than previously depicted. Confederate hopes were instead dashed by Edouard Thouvene, the Head of the French Foreign Ministry (until late 1862), and [End Page 520] his successor Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys. These very capable diplomats played a pivotal role in policy making. They believed an independent Confederacy would threaten plans in Mexico and that a divided U.S. was not an effective buffer against British imperialism. Both men deftly handled Napoleon’s outbursts during the war and always placed French strategic interests first and foremost. David Brown DAVID BROWN teaches U.S. history at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. He is co-author of A Concise American History (2020). Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

An Uphill Battle: The American Civil War in German Historiography

An Uphill Battle: The American Civil War in German Historiography Mischa Honeck (bio) In twenty-first-century Germany, the US Civil War rarely makes headlines. This changed somewhat in the wake of the Charlottesville riots in August 2017. Stunned by the show of force by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, which resulted in the death of thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, the German media scrambled for answers. It was the usual routine: talk shows and op-eds about the sad state of US race relations, the country’s hyper-partisanship, and the lack of moral leadership coming out of the White House. Occasional expert interviews tended to provide thicker descriptions; these often pointed to the emotionally charged memory landscapes that have continued to divide the nation since Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. Many fine and dear colleagues spoke out. They did a tremendous job. What was striking though: most considered themselves Americanists, but only a handful had written on the Civil War. Not one could look back on a career singularly devoted to studying that conflict and its afterlife. There are two main reasons for the relative invisibility of the US Civil War in recent German historiography: the first is systemic, the second one more methodological. Although there is nothing uniquely German about placing higher value on generalization in certain segments of our profession, the historical profession in the Federal Republic neither encourages nor rewards specialization if one focuses on non-European history. The “Civil War historian” is a foreign species in German academia. Usually German Americanists, if they do so at all, author one book on the subject before moving on to another topic or century altogether. This is what I did. People trying to secure a permanent professorship in this system are supposed to be generalists on “America.” Trying to be a James McPherson as a young scholar in German academia is the surest ticket to unemployment of which I am aware. The second reason has to do with recent developments in the field. Since at least the beginning of the new millennium, the historical profession in Germany and elsewhere has experienced seismic shifts, including the tendency to privilege transnational and global approaches. This has involved paying greater, and renewed, attention to the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization. My argument is that this widened lens has had ambivalent effects on non-Americans laboring in the field of US history in general and the history of the US Civil War in particular—effects that I will spell out in greater detail over the following pages. [End Page 161] Suffice it to say that new Civil War–related publications from German historians are rare and few. The last five biannual meetings of the Historikerverband—the German equivalent of the American Historical Association—did not feature a single paper on the war. Now that is something to ponder. I am far from suggesting, of course, that there is not a veritable tradition of German-language scholarship on the war that deserves mentioning. Therefore, I will devote the next couple paragraphs to recapitulating major themes and questions in Civil War histories authored by German scholars since the mid-nineteenth century. Although such an attempt can only be cursory, it will hopefully reveal that new interpretations have seldom emerged outside larger ideological shifts and political transformations. In closing, then, I will address whether the global history paradigm that is currently gaining more disciples (not just in German-speaking academia) will further sideline US-centered accounts of the Civil War or whether it might lead to an unlikely renaissance within surprising constellations and novel contexts. The earliest German-language works on the history of the Civil War came from people who saw it—immigrant soldiers, veterans, and commentators. The sheer scale of German American involvement in the conflict justified an intense public interest in the war on both sides of the Atlantic. An estimated two hundred thousand German Americans served in the armies of the North, which made them the largest ethnic minority to fight for the Union. Like their nationalist counterparts back home, these immigrant historians had an unabashedly ethnocentrist agenda. In highlighting...

Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War by Niels Eichhorn

Reviewed by: Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War by Niels Eichhorn Mischa Honeck (bio) Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War. By Niels Eichhorn. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Cloth, $45.00.) “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing,” Abraham Lincoln famously remarked at the opening of the Baltimore Sanitary Fair in April 1864. According to Niels Eichhorn’s new book, this aphorism might have been just as valid had [End Page 563] Lincoln spoken of separatism. In Liberty and Slavery, Eichhorn charts an understudied ideological current that connected violent nation-building projects on both sides of the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic. Too much ink has been spilled on the irreconcilability of liberalism and slavery, the author suggests, while Civil War historians have largely overlooked Euro-American actors who viewed southern secessionism and European separatism as kindred movements. Highlighting the difficulties and contingencies involved in transplanting revolutionary experiences made in one place to nationalist conflicts raging in another, Eichhorn is at his best when he shows that many immigrants forced to choose sides in the U.S. Civil War dreaded centralized modern leviathans as much as they loathed reactionary aristocracies. At its core, Liberty and Slavery is a book about the “other” Forty-Eighters—those participants of the failed European revolutions of the late 1840s and early 1850s who were more concerned with breaking away from oppressive states than with nationalist unification. But it also provides useful orientation in acquainting readers with little-known separatist revolutions that preceded the formation of the southern Confederacy. The first chapter ably sketches a string of tumultuous uprisings in 1830, stressing the common view held by independence seekers in Hungary, Poland, Ireland, and Schleswig-Holstein (less so in the U.S South) that “they were enslaved people who needed liberation” (12). What may sound cynical to modern ears—whites likening themselves to slaves—proved an effective rhetorical tool for secessionists of different origins. The upheavals of 1848, which are the subject of the second chapter, furthered the separatist creed across the North Atlantic world. Justifications for secession and the intensity with which such demands were articulated varied from place to place, and from person to person. Regrettably, the chapter is somewhat elusive on whether these differences were the product of cross-border exchange and adaptation or mainly an outgrowth of local circumstances. Transnationalism occupies a more prominent spot in the ensuing chapters. After briefly retracing the migratory routes of influential European separatists who fled to the United States after 1848, Eichhorn turns to what he calls “antebellum separatist interaction.” The analysis spans from a fresh reading of Lajos Kossuth’s quasi-diplomatic tour in 1851–52 to incisive portrayals of lesser-known exiles such as the Polish radical Adam Gurowski or the Schleswig-Holstein journalist Theodor Olshausen who struggled to adjust their European backgrounds to the increasingly bitter divisions of their host country. Their stance on slavery, Eichhorn argues, ultimately depended on whether they saw white southern leaders as political allies standing on firm constitutional footing or, conversely, as [End Page 564] progenies of Europe’s oppressive nobilities. The fifth and sixth chapters follow these exiled separatists through “America’s separatist revolution” of 1861 and the war that erupted in its wake. Eichhorn’s collective biography approach permits him to illustrate that nationality and ethnicity barely determined immigrant loyalties. Civil War careers like the one of the Polish Novembrist Kapcer Tochman, who offered his services to the Confederacy, disrupt the monolithic image of European revolutionists throwing their unquestioned support behind the Union. In one of the most fascinating episodes, Eichhorn presents the case of Rudolf Schleiden, a revolutionary-turned-diplomat from Schleswig-Holstein who embarked on a passionate yet ultimately quixotic quest in April 1861 to convince Union and Confederate leaders to step back from the brink of war. Throughout the book, Eichhorn makes clear that the immigrants’ “political roots” (11) and their continued reevaluation mattered. Very likely, the separatists’ choice of residence along with the personal and professional relationships they formed in the United States mattered...

A History of the Ozarks. Volume 2: The Conflicted Ozarks by Brooks Blevins

Reviewed by: A History of the Ozarks. Volume 2: The Conflicted Ozarks by Brooks Blevins Jeffrey C. Stone A History of the Ozarks. Volume 2: The Conflicted Ozarks. By Brooks Blevins. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 297. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-252-04273-7.) As the leading authority on the Ozarks, Brooks Blevins continues to produce thoughtful research that probes the identity of this region in the upper South. This book is the second in a series of three volumes that spans the history of the Ozark uplift. In this volume, The Conflicted Ozarks, Blevins delves into the Civil War era. He contends that this region encompassed political and cultural elements of southern, western, and midwestern identities. While located on the peripheries of each region, the Ozarks were mired in conflict during the period. By the outbreak of war, the Ozarks region, still evolving out of the frontier stage, was a "cultural borderland" that was coming of age but was never truly Union or Confederate. This history created a world of deep conflict, leaving the region a "blueprint for true civil warfare and for a generation of postwar animus and violence" (p. 4). Highlighting the fact that slavery was rather miniscule in the area, Blevins contends that the Ozarks were not immune to the slavery debate because the region was adjacent to the frontier territories. Blevins argues that the brand of slavery that existed in the Ozarks was closely related to what Ira Berlin calls a society with slaves. Even though the number of slaves was relatively sparse, ranging from none in some counties to over 12 percent of the population in others, slavery touched the lives of nearly everyone in some fashion. The Ozarks were not protected from the racial tensions that existed during the Civil War period. The proslavery factions were strong in the Ozarks, but their strength did not prevent abolitionists from joining the debate; much of the argument played out among the religious leaders on both sides of the issue. Blevins claims that, although the region was an afterthought to those directing the war from Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia, the Ozarks faced the same political and social schisms that played out in the East, only magnified as guerrilla warfare. Blevins asserts that, aside from a handful of notable battles like Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge early in the war, guerrilla warfare was much more damaging to the people of the region. The majority of [End Page 722] the people in the Ozarks were civilians caught up in a terrorizing warfare from both Union and Confederate raiders. Neither side could effectively establish control, leaving in their wake nothing but devastation and heartache. Throughout his study, Blevins masterfully shows why the Ozarks were vastly conflicted during the Civil War era. While analyzing the numerous skirmishes and raids by both Union and Confederate forces, he meticulously examines many of the lives of those who caused destruction through guerrilla warfare and of the civilians who were impacted by it. At war's end, the political fight continued, creating political and economic divides that delayed any kind of meaningful recovery for many years. With a detailed and captivating narrative, Blevins strategically inserts scholarly research to underscore his points. Although the final chapter, which focuses on economic developments during Reconstruction, is methodically researched and deserves exposure, Blevins is at his best in demonstrating the conflicted Ozarks with his analysis of the onset of war, the war itself, and the political divisions that persisted. Moreover, like any good historian, he raises questions that need further exploration. Blevins rightfully asserts that the voting pattern in the 1860 election needs a deeper analysis. While he only touches on runaway slaves who joined forces with the Unionists, the book raises questions for further research into slave resistance and culture. Blevins is painstaking with his research but narrates this conflicted era with ease. Civil War historians and regional scholars alike will enjoy his second volume on the history of the Ozarks. Jeffrey C. Stone American Public University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Biting the Bullet? Analyzing the Authenticity of “Bitten” Civil War Bullets

Abstract The public's attention was recently focused on Civil War history, which has manifested in various ways. One is the market for Civil War artifacts, particularly bullets presumably bitten by soldiers who underwent amputations as a result of warfare. This paper will address a study that analyzed a local museum's “bitten bullets” to determine the authenticity of the claim that the marks were human induced, as well as cover previous studies that focused on this same subject matter. The results of this and previous studies demonstrate that bitten bullets are largely the result of animal chewing and that there remains little to no evidence of humans biting bullets during amputation surgeries.

Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War by Stephanie McCurry

Reviewed by: Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War by Stephanie McCurry Jennifer Lynn Gross Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War. By Stephanie McCurry. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 297. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-674-98797-5.) In Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War, Stephanie McCurry works from the premise that “Women are not just witnesses to war”; they are actors in it and impact “all the major dynamics, processes, and outcomes of the war” (p. 203). In each of the book’s three chapters, she extensively illustrates instances when women played a transformative role in conventionally male realms like the military and politics. In sum, McCurry’s latest work reveals, “There is no Civil War history without women in it” (p. 204). In the first chapter, McCurry analyzes the change during the Civil War from the assumption of Confederate women as innocents to their consideration by Francis Lieber as potential “‘war rebel[s]’” (p. 41). The shift was not an easy one, but eventually President Abraham Lincoln’s administration was forced by Confederate women’s actions to dispense with the notion that women were “the quintessential noncombatants” and focus instead on their loyalty or disloyalty. McCurry concludes that the alteration in policy was radical: “There is a great deal at stake in the idea of women’s innocence and of noncombatant protection in war. It represents an investment in the gender order itself ” (p. 61). In chapter 2, McCurry explores how African American women were impacted by the Emancipation Proclamation’s call for African American soldiers. As she astutely puts it, “enslaved men were to take the martial path to freedom and enslaved women the marital one,” though there was no such legal person as the “‘slave wife’” (pp. 7, 63). Just as it was the enemy women who forced the change in the rules of war discussed in chapter 1, it was African American women who forced the federal government to recognize them. Importantly, McCurry observes, the hierarchical gender order of marriage was replicated “to govern the relations of the millions of new American citizens whose freedom was confirmed by the Thirteenth Amendment” (p. 122). Acknowledging that one life experience can only take historians so far toward a new history of Reconstruction, in chapter 3 McCurry uses Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas’s perspective to illuminate “how the huge structural changes in land, capital, and racial ideology that form the usual subjects of Reconstruction history were inextricably wound up with highly intimate matters of marriage and family, sexuality and love” (p. 10). In light of recent challenges to the idea that Reconstruction marked a significant break in American history (because of the legacy of racism in American society), McCurry makes a solid case for continuing to see Reconstruction as revolutionary, especially in how it impacted “the most personal realms of life, touching on matters of love and belonging, marriage and motherhood” (p. 201). Using three underconsidered stories of war, McCurry makes a solid argument that women participants were written off after the war as exceptions, and women’s role in the war became solely a story of sacrifice and service to men, [End Page 175] even though their participation had been widely acknowledged during the war. In the epilogue, McCurry considers why, concluding that this postbellum narrative emerged from assumptions about women’s “normative identity as wives willingly subject to the authority of their husbands. “Those principles are hard to live without,” she writes; “when war is over they have to be restored” (p. 205). Although men were certainly major actors in this willful forgetting, many women accepted these same ideas, even couching their postwar justification for women’s rights in terms of their sacrificial service to men during the war, not their own active heroism. Akin to the postwar whitewashing of the war as a so-called brother’s conflict instead of a war caused by slavery, McCurry illustrates “the larger historical problem of women and war: about how much of that past is disowned—or rendered exceptional—when it is in fact foundational” (p. 62). Jennifer Lynn Gross Jacksonville State...

Approaching Civil War and Southern History by William J. Cooper

Approaching Civil War and Southern History by William J. Cooper

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Erin Stewart Mauldin

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Erin Stewart Mauldin

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Erin Stewart Mauldin

Reviewed by: Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Erin Stewart Mauldin Brian Allen Drake (bio) Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South. By Erin Stewart Mauldin. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Cloth, $35.00.) About three years ago, I began writing a small piece for a book honoring my doctoral adviser Donald Worster. In "The Watershed of War," I argued for what I called an environmental history of the "big Civil War." The conflict's environmental scholarship was too focused on the battlefield, I wrote, and needed to take a much wider and longer view of the war's impact, particularly when it came to Reconstruction and after.1 I didn't know it at the time, but Erin Stewart Mauldin was hard at work on a book that would do exactly that. Unredeemed Land is a fine example of the insights to be gained by incorporating the environment into analyses of that complex and consequential period. Mauldin argues that the Civil War was an ecologically transformative event in the history of southern agriculture, one with profound implications for the region's environment and people alike. Why did it take so long, she asks, for the South to recover [End Page 136] agriculturally from the war? And when it did recover, why was cotton so dominant, even more than in prewar years? And what was the relationship between the ecology of postbellum cotton and the fate of the impoverished freedpeople supplying the labor to grow it? The answers begin "with the land itself," and what the war did to antebellum ways of living on it (7). Before the war, southern farming was a chaotic affair. In contrast with farming in the North, southern subsistence and plantation agriculture alike eschewed a curatorial approach for slash and burn, constantly carving fields out of forests and abandoning them for new plots as their fertility waned. Meanwhile, livestock roamed free in the remaining woodlands rather than in pastures, their manure lost instead of turned back into the soil. It was neither a beautiful nor a sustainable system over the long term, yet it was also a rational response to local ecological conditions, for the region's nutrient-poor and erosion-prone soils precluded northern-style settled husbandry. Instead, shifting agriculture patterns—augmented significantly by slave labor for the region's wealthier planters—allowed the circumvention of environmental limits. Untapped soils to the west also offered escape when those methods eventually failed back east. Ecologically as well as politically, slavery had to expand or die. This shifting system also proved uniquely vulnerable to the fortunes of war. As troops roamed the region, their voracious need for resources came as a body blow to an agricultural system already edging toward environmental failure. Requisitioning and plundering by Confederates and Federals alike consumed immense swaths of timber and legions of livestock, severely damaging the ecological base of the antebellum system and destroying what sustainability and balance it retained from prewar days. Meanwhile, the slave labor that was so critical to overcoming natural limits was increasingly unavailable. By the spring of 1865 there was no going back; the war had created a new ecological South. Ecological changes in turn produced agricultural and economic transformations, few of them for the better. Cotton, and more and more of it, became the only economic avenue for sharecroppers and landowners alike. In essence, the "tightening natural constraints" born of new environmental circumstances eliminated the option of resuming old ways and forced the region's farmers to adopt the intensive, settled northern agricultural model to cotton production despite its inappropriateness (162). With common lands devastated and freedpeople unwilling to perform the myriad ecological tasks required by antebellum-style plantations, deeply problematic alternatives emerged, including sharecropping and the subdivision of plantation land for tenancy, importation of food and the decline of subsistence farming, and continuous cultivation via massive applications of [End Page 137] fertilizers. Indeed, in the face of the system's exploitation and volatility, many freedpeople made their way into other extractive industries like timber, turpentine, and mining, and into the cities. The costs of...

New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon

Reviewed by: New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon Mark Grimsley New Perspectives on the Union War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8232-8453-5. 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. Most Northerners understood the Civil War as a conflict to preserve the Union. However, as this superior collection of essays maintains, they differed as to how to define the Union cause. Lincoln and his supporters, for example, saw emancipation primarily as a means to win the war. Critics on his political left saw the destruction of slavery as an end in itself. Moderates viewed the war as a contest against the Southern Slave Power and focused mainly on a quest for policies that would restore the Union on the loyal states' terms. Conservatives opposed both emancipation and the Lincoln administration's expansion of central government authority. They puzzled over how to support the Union government while opposing the president. Each of the eight essays in this collection explores one or more of these competing camps, and most do so through the lens of biography. Frank Cirillo uses an ardently antislavery couple, Stephen and Abby Foster, to make a fresh exploration of abolitionists who rejected a Union war as morally bankrupt—the Union, after all, had upheld slavery for its entire existence—and insisted upon a war for the complete liberation of enslaved Americans, full stop. Tamika Nunley examines the wartime career of Elizabeth Keckly, known primarily as Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress but also a skillful activist on behalf of black refugees and soldiers. Jack Furniss looks at New York politician Horatio Seymour, who attempted with much success to establish a moderate Democratic position of a loyal opposition that supported the Union war while being critical of the conduct of the war, as well as the machinations of the Radical Republicans. Will Kurtz examines the ways John Hughes, the Irish American archbishop of New York, and Patrick Donahoe, a prominent newspaper publisher, pointed to the valor of Union Catholic soldiers as a compelling argument against anti-Catholic nativism, while at the same time advancing a conservative vision that rejected the elision of a purely Union war into one that included the destruction of slavery. [End Page 316] Jesse George-Nichol assesses Attorney General Edward Bates, a former Whig from Missouri who waged a determined but ultimately losing battle to prevent the Lincoln administration from moving too far in its embrace of emancipation and in its willingness to wage a destructive war against the Confederacy. D. H. Dilbeck examines the German American jurist Francis Lieber's conviction that a successful Union war had to be a just war—a conviction that led him to prepare the rules of war now known as the Lieber Code. Michael Caires focuses on Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who presided over a fiscal revolution that centralized the Northern banking system in a successful bid to underwrite the immense expense of the Union war effort. The essay by Peter Luebke is the only one that departs from using a biographical lens. It examines dozens of postwar regimental histories to gain insight into the meanings that Union veterans assigned to their service in the salvation of the Republic. In their introduction to the volume, Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon argue that "taken together, these essays show a concept of 'Union' capacious enough to include a wide range of political agendas" (6). Loyal Americans nonetheless held in common three core convictions: that "affection rather than coercion should hold the Union together," that disunionism was "a lethal and highly contagious disease," and that slavery had to be removed "as the principal source of division—whether by compromise, reform, or revolution" (6–7). Gallagher and Varon are senior scholars with major reputations. The contributors, however, are without exception at the start of their careers (and closely connected to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia). To be sure, three contributors have books either published or forthcoming, and one has edited a new edition of a regimental history originally published in 1896...