The Civil War Era An Anthology of Sources

There is an extraordinary range of material in this anthology. Lincoln's Gettysburg address is here and so too is a contemporary account of a visit from the Ku Klux Klan. The primary sources reproduced are both visual and written, and the secondary sources present a remarkable breadth and quality of relevant scholarship. The book encourages its readersThe Civil War Era is a marvelous collection of Civil War scholarship and literature, containing readings, documents, and editorial commentary on the United States Civil War and its aftermath. Covering the political and military strategies, as well as the social and cultural history of the soldiers, their families, slaves and slaveowners, the book explores the intersections of regions, races, and genders. The essays and book chapters, mix great older scholarship with some newer great scholarship. An introduction adds historiographic detail about the older work, and how it fits in subsequent historical and political conversations. The book teaches how to "listen in" and make sense of the conversations of historians-and how to join them by interpreting material related to their arguments. Each section begins with a preface that pulls together secondary and primary sources, and introductions to the primary sources Web that will offer further avenues for exploration. Primary documents such as poetry, short stories, editorials, newspaper articles, speeches, illustrations, and political cartoons, as well as more personal documents like letters and diary entries, round out each section. Bibliographies and a timeline are also included, making this an authoritative, easy-to-use primer on the best research and writings about the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Lyde Cullen Sizer is Associate Professor of History at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Political Work of American Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (2000).

Jim Cullen teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. He is the author of The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (1995) and The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003), among other books. He is also the creator of a website, American History for Cynical Beginners: www.ecfs.org/projects/jcullen.