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In this wide-ranging volume, eminent historians John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault assemble a distinguished group of scholars to build on the growing body of work on the "Long Civil War" and break new ground. They cover a variety of related subjects, including antebellum missionary activity and colonialism in Africa, the home front, the experiences of disabled veterans in the US Army Veteran Reserve Corps, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal struggles with the war's legacy amid the growing civil rights movement. The contributors offer fresh interpretations and challenging analyses of topics such as ritualistic suicide among former Confederates after the war and whitewashing in Walt Disney Studios' historical Cold War era movies. Featuring many leading figures in the field, The Long Civil War meaningfully expands the focus of mid-nineteenth-century history as it was understood by previous generations of historians.

Literature that recounts the history of nineteenth-century Southern higher education includes Civil War-related issues as part of a larger, longitudinal narrative. In cases concerning the war years (1861-1865), existing publications focus on the closure, destruction, and reformation of regional colleges and universities due to student enlistment, the burning of buildings by Union troops, campus conversions to military barracks or army hospitals, etc. Few, however, focus completely on the Civil War South—even fewer provide detailed case examples that extol the persistence of some Southern colleges during the fray. Though most Southern institutions of higher education did close during the war, a handful of academies remained open, weathering the storm and providing instruction to remaining students. While related literature provides interesting insights regarding college student military service, the role some professors played as Confederate officers, and the reemergence of Southern higher education following the war, this text showcases how some colleges and universities remained open while battles rages in nearby fields, towns, and ports via in-depth case “episodes” of eleven Southern institutions of higher education: South Carolina Military Academy (The Citadel), Wofford College, Mississippi College, Spring Hill College, Tuskegee Female College, (present-day Huntingdon College), Mercer University, Wesleyan College, the University of Virginia, the Virginia Military Institute, the University of North Carolina, and Trinity College (now known as Duke University). This volume provides pertinent information that underscores events that occurred at each institutional site prior to, during, and after the deadliest internal conflict in American history.

For the last third of the nineteenth century, Union General Stephen Gano Burbridge enjoyed the unenviable distinction of being the most hated man in Kentucky. From mid-1864, just months into his reign as the military commander of the state, until his death in December 1894, the mere mention of his name triggered a firestorm of curses from editorialists and politicians. By the end of Burbridge's tenure, Governor Thomas E. Bramlette concluded that he was an "imbecile commander" whose actions represented nothing but the "blundering of a weak intellect and an overwhelming vanity. "In this revealing biography, Brad Asher explores how Burbridge earned his infamous reputation and adds an important new layer to the ongoing reexamination of Kentucky during and after the Civil War. Asher illuminates how Burbridge—as both a Kentuckian and the local architect of the destruction of slavery—became the scapegoat for white Kentuckians, including many in the Unionist political elite, who were unshakably opposed to emancipation. Beyond successfully recalibrating history's understanding of Burbridge, Asher's biography adds administrative and military context to the state's reaction to emancipation and sheds new light on its postwar pro-Confederacy shift.

In 1770, English missionary George Whitefield died in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His death marked the start of a complex legacy that in many ways rendered Whitefield more powerful and influential in the afterlife than during his considerable career. Whitefield was a religious icon shaped in the complexities of revivalism, the contest over religious toleration, and the conflicting role of Christianity for enslaved people. Pro-slavery Christians saw Christianity as a form of social control for slaves. Evangelical Christianity’s emphasis on “freedom in the eyes of God” also suggested a path to political freedom. The book’s analysis of Whitefield’s fluctuating views on slavery is among the book’s central contributions, as a topic that has not been addressed since the early 1970s, and then only briefly.

Singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, tells an essential yet understudied part of that story. Lift Every Voice and Sing, penned by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his brother Rosamond in 1900, was embraced as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of Black Americans almost immediately. This book shares the story of that song, as it traveled from South to North, from churches to schools, and from civil rights to Black power, and beyond. Because it is an anthem, the story of this song is also a social and cultural history. Readers will learn of the institutions and organizations, as well as the lessons and the emotions shared by those who sang together. Drawing on a wide array of materials including: letters, newspaper articles, essays, poems, novels, school curricula, speeches and the programs of hundreds of organizations, readers have a window into the robust social, cultural and political world that African Americans organized in the face of an unequal society, and how that world produced people who were capable of transforming the nation and world.

Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 stirred a keen interest among historians in both the approach and message of her book. Using women’s diaries, letters, and other personal documents, Scott brought to life southern women as wives and mothers, as members of their communities and churches, and as sometimes sassy but rarely passive agents. She brilliantly demonstrated that the familiar dichotomies of the personal versus the public, the private versus the civic, which had dominated traditional scholarship about men, could not be made to fit women’s lives. In doing so, Scott helped to open up vast terrains of women’s experiences for historical scholarship. This book, based on papers presented at the University of Mississippi’s annual Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History, brings together chapters by scholars at the forefront of contemporary scholarship on American women’s history. Each regards The Southern Lady as having shaped her historical perspective and inspired her choice of topics in important ways. These chapters demonstrate that the power of imagination and scholarly courage manifested in Scott’s and other early American women historians’ work has blossomed into a gracious plentitude.