Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

This thread explains the layout of the American Civil War folder.

There are threads dedicated to the following:

I. The Origin and the Causes of the American Civil War

A. Timeline of Events Leading up to the American Civil War

II. American Civil War - General Discussion Thread

III. The Theaters of the American Civil War

A. Eastern Theater of the American Civil War
B. Western Theater of the American Civil War
C. Lower Seaboard Theater of the American Civil War
D. Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War
E. Pacific Coast Theater of the American Civil War
F. Union blockade - Theater of the American Civil War

IV. The Campaigns of the American Civil War

A. Anaconda Plan - Campaign of the American Civil War
B. The New Mexico Campaign - Campaign of the American Civil War
C. Jackson's Valley Campaign - Campaign of the American Civil War
TBA
Suggest a Book for Group Reading
Suggest a Group Study Topic
Suggestions for additional threads
The American Civil War in Historical Fiction
Favorite Pastimes During the American Civil War

Note: I have added all of the threads which were dedicated to the discussion of the book Killer Angels by Michael Shaara dealing with the Battle of Gettysburg. This was an historical fiction novel. Unfortunately, when you bring the threads over, Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ does not order them correctly.

Michael Shaara

Just as an FYI: on CSPAN 3 there are a number of presentations this weekend regarding this period. CSPAN 3 is conducting a History weekend every weekend. Check your local guide for times and station; the majority of programs are repeated. Harold Holzer plays a pivotal role in one of them. He is a Lincoln scholar.



by Harold Holzer

These are some of the medical and surgical tools used in the Civil War:

[image error]

You have to wonder how anybody treated this way survived.

Reminds me of the opening scene of Dances with WOlves...

FUnny, isn't it, when you look at these and compare them to Roman surgical tools there wasn't that much of a difference...

Yes, scary isn't it.

Bentley wrote: "Yes, scary isn't it."

Indeed. Let's hope future physicians will be able to make bigger jumps.

Yes hopefully

Kevin:

Go ahead and cite the book like this, rather than a link. It is part of our guidelines.

Jamie Malanowski

If you haven't already, introduce yourself on our Welcome thread:
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9...

I like this book for an overall view:

James M. McPherson

Kevin, I appreciate your joining us but there is no useful reason for the link aside from self promotion. Another moderator deleted it originally and I can see that Bryan is trying to extract in good faith what you might have been referring to; but I think it was a plug for that website frankly.

If you could introduce yourself on the intro thread and just tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are from and what books and genres you like or dislike that would be great; but leave out links, any references to any books you have authored or are promoting because all of these will be deleted again.

Bentley,

Thank you for alerting me to the procedure around here. Will go ahead and follow your directions directly.

--Kevin

Folks, BBC has a great article today on the Civil War, the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War and a great exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Snapshots of the American Civil War

Includes a video



27 March 2013

This year marks 150 years since the Battle of Gettysburg, perhaps the most important - and certainly the bloodiest - battle of the American Civil War.

Coinciding with that anniversary the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is staging a landmark exhibition of what are being described as ''the finest and most poignant'' photographs from these cataclysmic four years in which an estimated 750,000 Americans lost their lives.

The Met's chief curator of photography, Jeff Rosenheim, has also written a book - Photography and the American Civil War - to accompany the show.

He's been speaking to Michael Maher.
================================

Hard to fathom 750,000 Americans losing their lives in their back yard.

by Jeff L. Rosenheim (no photo)

The scenes of the American Civil War are forever captured in the photography of Mathew Brady. They are irreplaceable!

Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation

by Robert Woodrow Wilson

Synopsis:

In the 1840s and 1850s, "Brady of Broadway" was one of the most successful and acclaimed Manhattan portrait galleries. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Dolley Madison, Henry James as a boy with his father, Horace Greeley, Edgar Allan Poe, the Prince of Wales, and Jenny Lind were among the dignitaries photographed in Mathew Brady's studio. But it was during the Civil War that he became the founding father of what is now called photojournalism and his photography became an enduring part of American history.

The Civil War was the first war in history to leave a detailed photographic record, and Mathew Brady was the war's chief visual historian. Previously, the general public had never seen in such detail the bloody particulars of war--the strewn bodies of the dead, the bloated carcasses of horses, the splintered remains of trees and fortifications, the chaos and suffering on the battlefield. Brady knew better than anyone of his era the dual power of the camera to record and to excite, to stop a moment in time and to draw the viewer vividly into that moment.

He was not, in the strictest sense, a Civil War photographer. As the director of a photographic service, he assigned Alexander Gardner, James F. Gibson, and others to take photographs, often under his personal supervision; he also distributed Civil War photographs taken by others not employed by him. Ironically, Brady had accompanied the Union army to the first major battle at Bull Run, but was so shaken by the experience that throughout the rest of the war he rarely visited battlefields, except well before or after a major battle. The famous Brady photographs at Antietam were shot by Gardner and Gibson.

Few books about Brady have gone beyond being collections of the photographs attributed to him, accompanied by a biographical sketch. MATHEW BRADY will be the biography of an American legend--a businessman, an accomplished and innovative technician, a suave promoter, a celebrated portrait artist, and, perhaps most important, a historian who chronicled America during its finest and gravest moments of the 19th century.

American Civil War: A History From Beginning to End

by Henry Freeman (no photo)

Synopsis:

Beginning with the birth of the nation, slavery divided and caused conflict for the United States of America, worsening during the country’s early decades as the practice became more economically vital. Finally, in 1861, the American Civil War erupted after the election of President Abraham Lincoln. Never acknowledging the South’s right to secede, Lincoln and the North fought the South through four long, bloody, destructive years; much longer than anyone thought the war would last.

Inside you will read about...
� America in the Antebellum Era
� Secession and the First Shots
� Early Battles and the Turning Point: April 1861-July 1863
� The United States and the Confederacy
� Women and Blacks in the War
� Military Events, 1863-1865: The War Ends
� Reconstruction
� The Legacy of the Civil War

By 1865, more than 700,000 American soldiers and civilians were dead (including Lincoln himself), a race of people had been freed from bondage, and an entire country needed to rebuild. The Civil War is of such crucial importance to the history of the United States not just because of these factors, but also because its legacy still lives on.

The story of one of our greatest presidents faced with a war that tore his country apart.

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

Synopsis:

Though Abraham Lincoln arrived at the White House with no previous military experience (apart from a couple of months spent soldiering in 1832), he quickly established himself as the greatest commander in chief in American history. James McPherson illuminates this often misunderstood and profoundly influential aspect of Lincoln's legacy. In essence, Lincoln invented the idea of commander in chief, as neither the Constitution nor existing legislation specified how the president ought to declare war or dictate strategy. In fact, by assuming the powers we associate with the role of commander in chief, Lincoln often overstepped the narrow band of rights granted the president. Good thing too, because his strategic insight and will to fight changed the course of the war and saved the Union.

For most of the conflict, he constantly had to goad his reluctant generals toward battle, and he oversaw strategy and planning for major engagements with the enemy. Lincoln was a self-taught military strategist (as he was a self-taught lawyer), which makes his adroit conduct of the war seem almost miraculous. To be sure, the Union's campaigns often went awry, sometimes horribly so, but McPherson makes clear how the missteps arose from the all-too-common moments when Lincoln could neither threaten nor cajole his commanders to follow his orders.

Because Lincoln's war took place within our borders, the relationship between the front lines and the home front was especially close—and volatile. Here again, Lincoln faced enormous challenges in exemplary fashion. He was a masterly molder of public opinion, for instance, defining the war aims initially as preserving the Union and only later as ending slavery, when he sensed the public was at last ready to bear such a lofty burden.

Tried by War offers a revelatory portrait of leadership during the greatest crisis our nation has ever endured. How Lincoln overcame feckless generals, fickle public opinion, and his own paralyzing fears is a story at once suspenseful and inspiring.

Folks just as an FYI - when we complete books that belong to this genre - the discussion threads are added to the bottom of the folder. Those threads are there for all of you who might want to read one of the books at a later time and if you post on them - we will always respond. However, we do not keep these threads up or add to them after the discussions are over with - they are there for you and if you want to post - we will talk with you and assist you and interact about the book until you have completed it. We are always here for you.

But please remember that we are all volunteers and not employees of goodreads - so we do all of this work for you free and in our free time. So be patient and we will get back to you.

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

by James M. McPherson

Synopsis:

Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War.

James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and military events that crowded the two decades from the outbreak of one war in Mexico to the ending of another at Appomattox. Packed with drama and analytical insight, the book vividly recounts the momentous episodes that preceded the Civil War--the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry--and then moves into a masterful chronicle of the war itself--the battles, the strategic maneuvering on both sides, the politics, and the personalities. Particularly notable are McPherson's new views on such matters as the slavery expansion issue in the 1850s, the origins of the Republican Party, the causes of secession, internal dissent and anti-war opposition in the North and the South, and the reasons for the Union's victory.

The book's title refers to the sentiments that informed both the Northern and Southern views of the conflict: the South seceded in the name of that freedom of self-determination and self-government for which their fathers had fought in 1776, while the North stood fast in defense of the Union founded by those fathers as the bulwark of American liberty. Eventually, the North had to grapple with the underlying cause of the war--slavery--and adopt a policy of emancipation as a second war aim. This "new birth of freedom," as Lincoln called it, constitutes the proudest legacy of America's bloodiest conflict.

This authoritative volume makes sense of that vast and confusing "second American Revolution" we call the Civil War, a war that transformed a nation and expanded our heritage of liberty.

The Medium and John Reeves state:

"This Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative will appeal to anyone interested in the Civil War. In a recent interview, McPherson said,

“To understand the society in which they live, Americans need to understand how it got that way, and the Civil War determined a large part of how it got that way.�

This book has been helping Americans better understand the Civil War for 30 years now.

McPherson is an outstanding historian who also happens to be a fine writer. In Battle Cry, there are insightful portraits of McClellan, Lincoln, Grant, and other important figures. Despite being almost 900 pages with lots of footnotes, it reads like a thriller.

An early reviewer of the book in The New York Times wrote, “Mr. McPherson is wonderfully lucid. Again and again, hopelessly knotty subjects (for example, Lincoln’s relations with the radical Republicans) are painlessly made clear.�

More:

Freedom National

by James Oakes (no photo)

Synopsis:

A powerful history of emancipation that reshapes our understanding of Lincoln, the Civil War, and the end of American slavery.

Freedom National is a groundbreaking history of emancipation that joins the political initiatives of Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress with the courageous actions of Union soldiers and runaway slaves in the South.

It shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery.

These two aims�"Liberty and Union, one and inseparable"—were intertwined in Republican policy from the very start of the war.

By summer 1861 the federal government invoked military authority to begin freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines in the disloyal South.

In the loyal Border States the Republicans tried coaxing officials into gradual abolition with promises of compensation and the colonization abroad of freed blacks.

James Oakes shows that Lincoln’s landmark 1863 proclamation marked neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation: it triggered a more aggressive phase of military emancipation, sending Union soldiers onto plantations to entice slaves away and enlist the men in the army.

But slavery proved deeply entrenched, with slaveholders determined to re-enslave freedmen left behind the shifting Union lines. Lincoln feared that the war could end in Union victory with slavery still intact.

The Thirteenth Amendment that so succinctly abolished slavery was no formality: it was the final act in a saga of immense war, social upheaval, and determined political leadership.

Fresh and compelling, this magisterial history offers a new understanding of the death of slavery and the rebirth of a nation.
8 pages illustrations

In Medium, John Reeves wrote the following:

"President Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural address, stated that, “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it.

These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.�

James Oakes, in this excellent book, recognizes the central importance of slavery in the war, and focuses on the origins and implementation of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

In his provocative and compelling account of emancipation, Oakes argues that Republicans, from the very beginning, “insisted that slavery was the cause of the rebellion, and emancipation an appropriate and ultimately indispensable means of suppressing it.�

Oakes also persuasively shows that destroying slavery turned out to be much more difficult than everyone expected.

The great historian of American slavery, David Brion Davis, has written of this book, “Oakes brilliantly succeeds in distilling from a great mass of facts a series of clear themes and arguments that provide a new perspective on one of the central events in American history."

More:


Source: Medium