...This chapter studies the Civil War-era black migration to Worcester County, affording a rare glimpse into the lives and strategies of freedpeople, of black men, women, and children as they shaped and defined their own freedom. It notes that their stories show the way in which former slaves...

...This chapter examines African Americans' experiences of night riding in the post-Civil War era. African Americans were on the front lines of the war between southern white Democrats and Republicans and the Republicans' efforts to create a more inclusive democracy in the South after the Civil War...

...The epilogue uses speeches and writings in 1880s from Frederick Douglass, Albion Tourgée, and Ulysses S. Grant to explore the contested meanings, outcomes, and implications of the American Civil War Era. Each correspondent explained that the era’s noble verdicts—Union, emancipation, and civil...

...The opening chapter of Part III focuses on alternative routes not taken during the Civil War era. This chapter offers an in-depth exploration of the rejected option of compensated emancipation, an option the authors argue would have prevented or attenuated the Civil War while also ending slavery...

...This book explores how the Civil War changed America and the world. Instead of drawing on the Reconstruction as a framework for understanding the post-Civil War era—and thus envisioning a Reconstruction of the West or the Plains or the world—the book thinks across regions in order to understand...

..., sermons, travel narratives, photographs, and illustrations. Although physical ruins were largely confined to the South, representations of ruins did important work in the cultural spaces of the North. This chapter explores the intellectual and cultural terrain of the early post-Civil War era by focusing...

...This chapter examines the experiences of Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca, to highlight the paradox of Reconstruction politics in Indian Country in the post-Civil War era. In September 1861, Parker approached Secretary of State William Seward requesting a commission in the United States Army...

...This chapter describes how religious faith offered meaning to life and preparation for death to men and women of the Civil War era. Early on the ravages of camp diseases proved the need for the comforting assurances of a heavenly home, and it was especially sobering when young men died who appeared...

... described today as settler colonialism, unfolded alongside and in close relation to what historians call the Civil War era, involving its struggles over Western lands, wartime military conflict, and Reconstruction battles over citizenship and rights. Histories such as the Ho-Chunks’ have largely disappeared...

..., free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood?In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political...