The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Its Region ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Military Campaign ◽  
The Impact

This volume integrates the military and social histories of the American Civil War in its chapter organization. Its contributors use war and society methods: a holistic approach to understanding war and its consequences that incorporates the topics and techniques of a variety of historical subfields. Each chapter narrates a military campaign embedded in its strategic, political, and social context. Authors explore the consequences of a military campaign for the people who lived in its path and provide analysis of how an army’s presence reverberated throughout society in its region of operation. The volume yields a number of important insights about the impact of military campaigns, including the scale of movement, deportation, and depopulation among civilians; how the refugee experience and military action shaped emancipation as a process; the extent of guerrilla warfare; resistance to federal authority in the Great Plains and the Southwest; locations of localized total war; the implementation of military conscription in the Confederacy; a campaign’s consequences for cities, rural areas, and the natural environment; and the synergy between war and politics. Chapters consider the role of weather, topography, logistics, and engineering in the conduct of military campaigns.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. xiv-33
Author(s):  
Lorien Foote ◽  
Earl J. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Temporal Analysis ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Total War ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Analysis ◽  
War And Society ◽  
Military Campaigns

The introduction to The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War provides an overview of historical scholarship regarding the effect of military campaigns on nonmilitary resources and people. Using war and society methods, it explores the consequences of military campaigns in the political, social, and environmental spheres. Topics covered in the introduction include movement, deportation, and depopulation among civilians; refugees; military action and emancipation; insurrection; guerrilla warfare; resistance to Federal authority on the Great Plains and in the Southwest; gender; African Americans, Hispanos, and Native Americans; locations of localized total war; military conscription in the Confederacy; cities, rural areas, and the natural environment; the synergy between war and politics; religion; spatial, and temporal analysis of military campaigns; logistics; the soldier experience; and medical care.

Losing the Thread

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Powell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cotton Trade

Losing the Thread is the first full-length study of the effect of the American Civil War on Britain’s raw cotton trade and on the Liverpool cotton market. It details the worst crisis in the British cotton trade in the 19th century. Before the civil war, America supplied 80 per cent of Britain’s cotton. In August 1861, this fell to almost zero, where it remained for four years. Despite increased supplies from elsewhere, Britain’s largest industry received only 36 per cent of the raw material it needed from 1862 to 1864. This book establishes the facts of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the war: how much there was of it, in absolute terms and in relation to the demand, where it came from and why, how much it cost, and what effect the reduced supply had on Britain’s cotton manufacture. It includes an enquiry into the causes of the Lancashire cotton famine, which contradicts the historical consensus on the subject. Examining the impact of the civil war on Liverpool and its cotton market, the book disputes the historic portrayal of Liverpool as a solidly pro-Confederate town. It also demonstrates how reckless speculation infested and distorted the raw cotton market, and lays bare the shadowy world of the Liverpool cotton brokers, who profited hugely from the war while the rest of Lancashire starved.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Jim Powell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cotton Trade

This chapter describes the objectives of the book. No full-length work exists on the crisis in the British cotton trade during the American Civil War, and the only substantial study of the raw cotton market in Liverpool was made by Thomas Ellison 130 years ago. The book remedies these omissions. It has two objectives. First, to establish the factual record of Britain’s raw cotton supply during the civil war. Second, to examine the impact of the civil war on Liverpool, and on the operation of the raw cotton trade there, with specific reference to the role of the cotton brokers. The chapter discusses the existing historiography and its deficiencies, and describes the primary sources that underpin this study. It establishes the crucial, and neglected, importance of price to the trade in raw cotton.

Ontological security and the power of self-identity: British neutrality and the American Civil War

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRENT J STEELE
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Relations ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Alternative Framework ◽  
Ir Studies ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
The Impact

Why did Great Britain remain neutral during the American Civil War? Although several historical arguments have been put forth, few studies have explicitly used International Relations (IR) theories to understand this decision. Synthesising a discursive approach with an ontological security interpretation, I propose an alternative framework for understanding security-seeking behaviour and threats to identity. I assess the impact Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had upon the interventionist debates in Great Britain. I argue that the Proclamation reframed interventionist debates, thus (re)engendering the British anxiety over slavery and removing intervention as a viable policy. I conclude by proposing several issues relevant to using an ontological security interpretation in future IR studies.

Storms Moving in a Ring of Fire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Military ◽  
Union Army ◽  
Signal Corps ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Impact

Opening with the impact of the Civil War on telegraphic communications in Washington, this chapter discusses the lack of telegraph security at the onset of the war. Various decisions by Edwin Stanton, Western Union, and telegraph corporations led to the creation of the United States Military Telegraph (USMT) Company, which effectively privatized Union Army telegraph communications and blunted Albert Myer and the Signal Corps. The latter half of the chapter details the increasing conflicts between indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and various militias and Union Army troops, including the Sand Creek Massacre, the Julesburg battles, and the retaliatory actions against the Transcontinental Telegraph and telegraph branch lines by Great Plains warriors in 1865 and 1866.

Benjamin Drew and Samuel Gridley Howe on Race Relations in Early Ontario: Mythologizing and Debunking Canada West’s “Moral Superiority”

2021 ◽  
pp. e20200025
Author(s):  
Donna Palmateer Pennee
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Historical Presence ◽  
Moral Superiority ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Canada West

This essay examines the respective mythologizing and debunking of Canada’s “moral superiority” over the United States on matters of white-Black race relations in Benjamin Drew’s 1856 The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada and Samuel Gridley Howe’s 1864 The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West. Their accounts of the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and American Civil War on Canadian and American political reputations are instructive. The historical presence of Black people in the making of Ontario’s history and its relationship to American ante-bellum history helps to understand in part from where the superiority myth originates. The impact of the American Civil War on the making of Canada as a political entity has been studied by historians but its cultural force is less studied, particularly in literary studies. The relative absence of such knowledge seems part and parcel of the negative definition of Canada as not-American, indeed anti-American, and has helped to continue the mythology of Canada’s moral superiority over the US on matters of white-Black relations. Drew’s and Howe’s work on the substantial presence of Black settlers in early Ontario has been invaluable for the study of both the diaspora and settlement of Black freedom seekers in Upper Canada/Canada West in the antebellum period. Analysis of the rhetoric of national differences on racism in Drew’s The Refugee (1856) and Howe’s The Refugees (1864), particularly on education and law, counters, as does a wealth of scholarship by Black scholars, the myth of Canada’s racial benevolence.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document