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"On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Master storyteller Erik Larson...
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English
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As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of its defining national drama, "1861" presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began. The text introduces a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes--among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer's wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
Explores the Civil War and the anti-slavery movement, specifically highlighting the plan to help abolish slavery by surrounding the slave states with territories of freedom and discusses the possibility of what could have been a more peaceful alternative to the war.
Author
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English
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Description
Biographer and historian Stephen B. Oates tells the story of the coming of the American Civil War through the voices and perspectives of thirteen principal players in the drama, from Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay in the Missouri crisis of 1820 down to Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and Abraham Lincoln in the final crisis of 1861. This innovative approach shows the crucial role that perception of events played in the sectional hostilities that...
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English
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How partisan politics lead to the Civil War
What brought about the Civil War? Leading historian Michael F. Holt convincingly offers a disturbingly contemporary answer: partisan politics. In this brilliant and succinct book, Holt distills a lifetime of scholarship to demonstrate that secession and war did not arise from two irreconcilable economies any more than from moral objections to slavery. Short-sighted politicians were to blame. Rarely looking...
Author
Pub. Date
[2011]
Language
English
Description
By the middle of the 1800s, the United States had become two separate societies. The North and the South were divided by vast economic, educational, and cultural differences. There was widespread misunderstanding and even hatred between the two regions of the country. But it was one specific issue--slavery--that would erupt in disaster.
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Language
English
Formats
Description
Lincoln, who in afterlife became mythologized as the Great Emancipator, was shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of anti-slavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation," concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In 1861, he had reluctantly taken the...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"The Underground Railroad to the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War. But during the same decades, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico. In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for enslaved people in North America. She describes how Mexico's...
Author
Pub. Date
[2011]
Language
English
Description
In this spellbinding new history, Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom." Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure.--
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Explains how fugitive slaves escaping from the South to the northern states awakened northerners to the true nature of slavery and how the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act divided the nation and set it on the path to civil war.--
16) The zealot and the emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the struggle for American freedom
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Language
English
Description
"What do moral people do when democracy countenances evil? The question, implicit in the idea that people can govern themselves, came to a head in America at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the struggle over slavery. John Brown's answer was violence--violence of a sort some in later generations would call terrorism. Brown was a deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to do whatever was necessary...
17) The Civil War
Pub. Date
2004.
Language
English
Description
An epic documentary bringing life to America's most destructive - and defining - conflict. Here is the saga of celebrated generals and the ordinary soldiers. A heroic and transcendent president and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one again.
Author
Pub. Date
[2011]
Language
English
Description
"After years abroad, Jasper Wainwright returns to Beaufort, South Carolina, home of his unruly youth. Slavery and Sea Island cotton have made this summer seat of plantation owners one of the wealthiest and most cultured cities in America . . . and also the most hotheaded, secessionist city in the South.Jasper's cousin, Henry Birch, wants him to marry his niece, Cara, a pianist and the prettiest girl in the county. Believing slavery doomed, Jasper...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2010.
Language
English
Description
Charles Sumner was seated at his Senate desk on May 22, 1856, when Democratic Congressman Preston S. Brooks approached, pulled out a walking stick, and struck him on the head. Brooks continued to beat the stunned Sumner, forcing him to the ground and repeatedly striking him even as the cane shattered. He then pursued the bloodied, staggering Republican senator up the Senate aisle until Sumner collapsed. Colleagues of the two intervened only after...
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