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This study examines the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians and their white allies created, developed and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. As partners and circumstances changed over the twenty-five year period, Green argues that urban African Americans never lost sight of their vision of citizenship in their struggle for educational access and legitimacy; and consequently, they successfully enshrined the African American schoolhouse as the fundamental vehicle for distancing themselves from their slave past. The African American schoolhouse embodied black Richmonders’ and black Mobilians’ participation in the redefinition of American citizenship and transformation of the physical landscape wrought by Confederate defeat. Green contends that the end of Freedmen’s Bureau resulted in the expansion and not contraction of African American education. By demanding quality public schools from their new city and state partners, black Richmonders and black Mobilians found additional success through the employment of African American teachers, creation of normal schools, and development of a robust curriculum. Ultimately, Green concludes that their collective inability to resolve school funding challenges resulted in the demise of Educational Reconstruction and the ushering of a new phase of African American education in 1890.

This book argues that the religious history of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the surrounding area, the Border North, was particularly modern for its time and reveals much about larger American society. Refinement, for example, was pervasive and typified American religion. The diversity of Gettysburg religion, including multiple denominations, ethnicity, doctrinal disagreements, and higher education (a seminary and a college), created variety remarkable for a small antebellum town but characteristic of modern America. Race added more diversity to the community and predicted national trends beyond the Civil War when all blacks became emancipated and controlled their own religious organizations but otherwise remained second-class citizens. When the two armies collided in Gettysburg, life turned upside-down for this lively, diverse religious community, but afterwards congregations repaired their facilities and resumed their quest for improvement. This, the book argues for moderate rather than seismic change during the Civil War era with the most conspicuous adjustment coming with the growth of civil religion, which after the war became permanently embedded in the modern American nation-state. In this way, too, Gettysburg religion belonged to the future. Finally, the book gives special emphasis to everyday religious activity and idiosyncrasies that make human behavior so interesting. Thus, this little town and the region teach fascinating lessons about American life.

This book examines the development and application of character, a code of honor that motivated the gentleman class of the North during the Civil War Era. The “New Brahmins,” college-educated men who constituted the elite of northern society, learned this code of behavior in their classrooms and social settings. Character encompasses ideas of proper masculine behavior, nationalistic beliefs, and a leadership class identity that these highly educated men attempted to live by. The Civil War represented both a crisis and opportunity for these young men. Viewing secession as a threat to their vision of an American-led world where representative government and free labor dominated, these members of the North’s professional class also saw the war as an opportunity to prove themselves and demonstrate their character to society at large. Travelling through the South as junior officers in the Union Army, New Brahmins evaluated the people and society they came across using the nationalist and character-based framework that they had adopted for their own code of conduct. Additionally, these men identified traits of character in their adversaries and this recognition helped promote reconciliation between the gentleman classes of the two sections after the conflict.

This book is a study of soldiers who served in Irish regiments during the American Civil War and the communities that supported them. Tracing the organization and service of self-proclaimed Irish units from Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin, this study transitions the historical debate away from the motivations and sentiment of “Irish America”—a national cohesive entity with similar experiences and attitudes—and towards “Irish Americas,” men and women connected to both local as well as national communities. Such an approach allows us to better understand how adopted citizens, their comrades in arms, and their friends and neighbors experienced the Civil War era. As a social history of the Civil War, Shades of Green explores the experiences, motivations, political identities, and ideologies of Union soldiers and civilians with a particular focus on the impact of the war on immigrants in smaller communities scattered throughout the North. Utilizing an array of sources including muster and descriptive rolls, federal census data, and veterans pensions, this book argues that Irish regiments were as much the expressions of local enlistment patterns as they were reflections of a commitment to a broader Irish American national identity.

This edited collection of essays brings together the work of senior and junior scholars to demonstrate how social and cultural tools complement intellectual history. George Fredrickson’s pioneering work, The Inner Civil War (1965), has long been the seminal text for scholars interested in the intellectual history of the American Civil War Era. The historians in this volume broaden the scope of what has traditionally been considered intellectual history. By including works about the history of medicine, art history, Catholic history, education, ethnicity, and identity, these contributions demonstrate how intellectual history informs many different fields within the study of nineteenth-century U.S. history. Additionally, the volume expands the definition of which individuals in society are considered intellectuals: Health reformers, sketch artists, college professors, lawyers, and religious leaders are considered alongside Fredrickson’s writers and business leaders. Following up on Fredrickson’s queries, this volume examines whether the Civil War forced out or strengthened old notions and ideas, supported or suppressed democratic individualism, and challenged or maintained ideas about nationalism. In short, the essays in this collection ponder whether the Civil War changed how northerners viewed themselves, others, and individuals’ roles in American society.

While most of the fighting took place in the South, the Civil War profoundly affected the North. As farm boys became soldiers and marched off to battle, social, economic and political changes transformed northern society. In the generations following the conflict historians tried to understand and explain the North's Civil War experience. Many historical explanations became taken for granted, such as that the Union Army was ideologically Republican, northern Democrats were disloyal, and German-Americans were lousy soldiers. Ten iconoclastic scholars take aim at many of the accepted interpretations of the Civil War North is this provocative new anthology. The essays in this volume range widely throughout the history of the Civil War North, using new methods and sources to reexamine old theories and discover new aspects of the nation's greatest conflict. Many of these issues are just as important today as they were a century and a half ago. What were the extent and limits of wartime dissent in the North± How could a president most effectively present himself to the public± Can the savagery of war ever be tamed± How did African Americans create and maintain their families± Highlighting the newest scholarship on a diverse array of topics, this anthology is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Civil War affected millions of lives, changed society, and transformed a nation.

In its brief seven-year existence, the Freedmen’s Bureau became the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Cognizant of its responsibilities, partisans fiercely debated its necessity. Historians continued that debate about the agency’s policies and necessity. But historians have only recently begun to focus on the Bureau’s personnel in Texas, the individual agents termed the “hearts of Reconstruction.” Not ignoring individual experiences and attitudes, this work focuses on them at a more personal level. Where were they from? Were they wealthy? Were they married or single? Did the agency prefer the young? Did agents have military experience or were they civilians? What occupations did the Bureau draw from? The answers illuminate the type of man Bureau officials believed qualified—or not—to oversee the freedpeople’s transition to freedom. Officials in Texas desired those able to meet emancipation’s challenges. That meant northern-born, mature, white men from the middle and upper-middle class, and generally with military experience. Dispelling the idea of a uniform Bureau policy, this work shows that each agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency’s policy in his subdistrict. They protected freedpeople’s labor and established their right to set up a household (and protected within in it). They worked to recognize their marriages, and, despite the practice of apprenticeship, they tried to establish their rights as parents to their children. These men further ensured the former slaves’ right to an education and right of mobility, something they never had while in bondage.