Finding Books in the Library
Locating books on your topic will help you understand the full scope of your topic. You do not need to read the entire book, but you should read the chapters that are relevant and interesting to you that focus on a specific aspect of the topic. Below are suggestions for further reading on the topics assigned to this course.
Search the library catalog for print and online books. Type your keywords into the box below, for example Women AND Civil war. Limit to the type of source you want by choosing the appropriate box from the options to the left of your search results. For more information on locating print books and using eBooks see these library pages:
Civil War
Fighting for Citizenship by In Fighting for Citizenship, Brian Taylor complicates existing interpretations of why black men fought in the Civil War. Civil War-era African Americans recognized the urgency of a core political concern: how best to use the opportunity presented by this conflict over slavery to win abolition and secure enduring black rights, goals that had eluded earlier generations of black veterans.
A Republic in the Ranks by In this comprehensive reassessment of the army's politics, Zachery A. Fry argues that the war was an intense political education for its common soldiers. Fry examines several key crisis points to show how enlisted men developed political awareness that went beyond personal loyalties.
Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War by David Silkenat here provides the first comprehensive study of Civil War surrender, focusing on the conflicting social, political, and cultural meanings of the action.
Searching for black Confederates : the Civil War's most persistent myth by Call Number: E 585 .A35 L48 2019Levin explains that imprecise contemporary accounts, poorly understood primary-source material, and other misrepresentations helped fuel the rise of the black Confederate myth.
Lincoln's Spies by Call Number: E 608 .W36 2019A major addition to the history of the Civil War, Lincoln's Spies is a riveting account of the secret battles waged by Union agents to save a nation. Filled with espionage, sabotage, and intrigue, it is also a striking portrait of a shrewd president who valued what his operatives uncovered.
Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War, 1861-1865 by The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes -- the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole -- during America's Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature.
People
The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation by Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War--North and South, white and black, slave and free--showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas.
Heroines of Mercy Street: The real nurses of the Civil War by Call Number: E 621 .T65 2016Heroines of Mercy Street follows the lives of women like Dorothea Dix, Mary Phinney, Anne Reading, and more before, during, and after their epic struggle in Alexandria and reveals their personal contributions to this astounding period in the advancement of medicine.
Turning Points of the American Civil War by Turning Points of the American Civil War examines key shifts and the context surrounding them, demonstrating that the war was a continuum of watershed events.
River of Blood: American Slavery from the People Who Lived It: Interviews & Photographs of Formerly Enslaved African Americans by Call Number: E 444 .R59 2020The book documents what slaves saw and remembered, and explains how they lived. It is an eye-opening account that details what it was like to be a slave--from everyday life to the overwhelming fear they harbored for their lives and for the lives of their family and loved ones.
Friendly Enemies: Soldier Fraternization Throughout the American Civil War by In Friendly Enemies Lauren K. Thompson analyzes the relations and fraternization of American soldiers on opposing sides of the battlefield and argues that these interactions represented common soldiers' efforts to fight the war on their own terms.
Reconstruction
Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era by The book Black Rights in the Reconstruction Era pays significant scholarly attention to the intellectual ferment--legal and political--of the nineteenth-century by tracing the history of black Americans' civil rights to the postbellum era.
United States Reconstruction Across the Americas by Here, three leading international scholars explore how emancipation, nationhood and nationalism, and the spread of market capitalism--issues central to the period in the United States--were interwoven with global patterns of political, social, and economic change.
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow by Call Number: E 185.61 .G253 2019Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African-Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a 'New Negro' to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to the United States.
A Refugee from His Race: Albio W. Tourgee and His Fight against White Supremacy by During one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, when white supremacy was entrenching itself throughout the nation, the white writer-jurist-activist Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) forged an extraordinary alliance with African Americans.
Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction by In Gold and Freedom, Nicolas Barreyre recovers the story of how economic issues became central to American politics after the war. The idea that a financial debate was as important for Reconstruction as emancipation may seem remarkable, but the war created economic issues that all Americans, not just southerners, had to grapple with, including a huge debt, an inconvertible paper currency, high taxation, and tariffs.
