The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393292649
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lincoln Prize A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective. At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.

The Thin Light of Freedom

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Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0393356434
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis The Thin Light of Freedom by : Edward L Ayers

Download or read book The Thin Light of Freedom written by Edward L Ayers and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Lincoln Prize A landmark Civil War history told from a fresh, deeply researched ground-level perspective. At the crux of America’s history stand two astounding events: the immediate and complete destruction of the most powerful system of slavery in the modern world, followed by a political reconstruction in which new constitutions established the fundamental rights of citizens for formerly enslaved people. Few people living in 1860 would have dared imagine either event, and yet, in retrospect, both seem to have been inevitable. In a beautifully crafted narrative, Edward L. Ayers restores the drama of the unexpected to the history of the Civil War. From the same vantage point occupied by his unforgettable characters, Ayers captures the strategic savvy of Lee and his local lieutenants, and the clear vision of equal rights animating black troops from Pennsylvania. We see the war itself become a scourge to the Valley, its pitched battles punctuating a cycle of vicious attack and reprisal in which armies burned whole towns for retribution. In the weeks and months after emancipation, from the streets of Staunton, Virginia, we see black and white residents testing the limits of freedom as political leaders negotiate the terms of readmission to the Union. With analysis as powerful as its narrative, here is a landmark history of the Civil War.

In the Presence of Mine Enemies

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393326017
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (26 download)

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Book Synopsis In the Presence of Mine Enemies by : Edward L Ayers

Download or read book In the Presence of Mine Enemies written by Edward L Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004-09-07 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ayers gives readers the Civil War on an intimate scale. His masterful narrative conveys the coming of war and its bloody encounters through the eyes of those who sacrificed, fought, and died.

What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393285154
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book What Caused the Civil War?: Reflections on the South and Southern History written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-08-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.

Southern Crossing

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190282185
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Southern Crossing by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book Southern Crossing written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-12 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edward L. Ayers monumental history, Promise of the New South, was praised by the eminent historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown as "A work of frequently stunning beauty," who added "The elegance and sensitivity that he achieves are typical of few historical works." Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize for Best Book on American Race Relations from the Organization of American Historians, and the Frank Lawrence Owsley and Harriett Chappell Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association, and finalist for the 1992 National Book Award, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History, and the 1993 Southern Book Award, Promise of the New South established Ayers as one of the foremost scholars of the American South. Now, in this newly revised edition, Ayers has distilled this remarkable work to offer an even more readable account of the New South. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts--a time of progress and repression, of new industries and old ways. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic "Redeemers" swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Here is the local Baptist congregation, the country store, the tobacco-stained second-class railroad car, the rise of Populism: the teeming, nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. And central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement. Ayers weaves all these details into the contradictory story of the New South, showing how the region developed the patterns it was to follow for the next fifty years. A vivid portrait of a society undergoing the sudden confrontation of the promises, costs, and consequences of modern life, this is an unforgettable account of the New South--a land with one foot in the future and the other in the past.

The Loyal Republic

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469636336
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis The Loyal Republic by : Erik Mathisen

Download or read book The Loyal Republic written by Erik Mathisen and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of how Americans attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, at a moment of fracture in the republic's history. As Erik Mathisen demonstrates, prior to the Civil War, American national citizenship amounted to little more than a vague bundle of rights. But during the conflict, citizenship was transformed. Ideas about loyalty emerged as a key to citizenship, and this change presented opportunities and profound challenges aplenty. Confederate citizens would be forced to explain away their act of treason, while African Americans would use their wartime loyalty to the Union as leverage to secure the status of citizens during Reconstruction. In The Loyal Republic, Mathisen sheds new light on the Civil War, American emancipation, and a process in which Americans came to a new relationship with the modern state. Using the Mississippi Valley as his primary focus and charting a history that traverses both sides of the battlefield, Mathisen offers a striking new history of the Civil War and its aftermath, one that ushered in nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of citizenship in the United States.

America Aflame

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608193748
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (81 download)

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Book Synopsis America Aflame by : David Goldfield

Download or read book America Aflame written by David Goldfield and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this spellbinding new history, David 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: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second GreatAwakening surged through America, political questions became matters of good and evil to be fought to the death. The price of that failure was horrific, but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United States one nation and eliminated slavery as a divisive force in the Union. The victorious North became synonymous with America as a land of innovation and industrialization, whose teeming cities offered squalor and opportunity in equal measure. Religion was supplanted by science and a gospel of progress, and the South was left behind. Goldfield's panoramic narrative, sweeping from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction, is studded with memorable details and luminaries such as HarrietBeecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. There are lesser known yet equally compelling characters, too, including Carl Schurz-a German immigrant, warhero, and postwar reformer-and Alexander Stephens, the urbane and intellectual vice president of the Confederacy. America Aflame is a vivid portrait of the "fiery trial"that transformed the country we live in.

The Promise of the New South

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199724555
Total Pages : 592 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis The Promise of the New South by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book The Promise of the New South written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

Oration by Frederick Douglass. Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14th, 1876, with an Appendix

Download Oration by Frederick Douglass. Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14th, 1876, with an Appendix PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN 13 : 3385512875
Total Pages : 30 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Oration by Frederick Douglass. Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14th, 1876, with an Appendix by : Frederick Douglass

Download or read book Oration by Frederick Douglass. Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14th, 1876, with an Appendix written by Frederick Douglass and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

A Question of Freedom

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300256272
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis A Question of Freedom by : William G. Thomas

Download or read book A Question of Freedom written by William G. Thomas and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

The Oxford Book of the American South

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Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195124936
Total Pages : 608 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (951 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Book of the American South by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book The Oxford Book of the American South written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathers short stories, journalism, and excerpts from novels, diaries, and memoirs by Southern authors.

Exposing Slavery

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190663952
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis Exposing Slavery by : Matthew Fox-Amato

Download or read book Exposing Slavery written by Matthew Fox-Amato and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within a few years of the introduction of photography into the United States in 1839, slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass had come to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype studios of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph. Exposing Slavery explores how photography altered and was, in turn, shaped by conflicts over human bondage. Drawing on an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, free African Americans, and abolitionists, as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, enslaved people to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to pictorially enact interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a political tool over only a few decades. This creative first book sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, while also revealing a key moment in the relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.

Vengeance and Justice

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Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 9780195039887
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (398 download)

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Book Synopsis Vengeance and Justice by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book Vengeance and Justice written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1986 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race, Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime.

The Calculus of Violence

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067491631X
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis The Calculus of Violence by : Aaron Sheehan-Dean

Download or read book The Calculus of Violence written by Aaron Sheehan-Dean and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-05 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Jefferson Davis Award Winner of the Johns Family Book Award Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award “A work of deep intellectual seriousness, sweeping and yet also delicately measured, this book promises to resolve longstanding debates about the nature of the Civil War.” —Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg—tens of thousands of soldiers died on these iconic Civil War battlefields, and throughout the South civilians suffered terrible cruelty. At least three-quarters of a million lives were lost during the American Civil War. Given its seemingly indiscriminate mass destruction, this conflict is often thought of as the first “total war.” But Aaron Sheehan-Dean argues for another interpretation. The Calculus of Violence demonstrates that this notoriously bloody war could have been much worse. Military forces on both sides sought to contain casualties inflicted on soldiers and civilians. In Congress, in church pews, and in letters home, Americans debated the conditions under which lethal violence was legitimate, and their arguments differentiated carefully among victims—women and men, black and white, enslaved and free. Sometimes, as Sheehan-Dean shows, these well-meaning restraints led to more carnage by implicitly justifying the killing of people who were not protected by the laws of war. As the Civil War raged on, the Union’s confrontations with guerrillas and the Confederacy’s confrontations with black soldiers forced a new reckoning with traditional categories of lawful combatants and raised legal disputes that still hang over military operations around the world today. In examining the agonizing debates about the meaning of a just war in the Civil War era, Sheehan-Dean discards conventional abstractions—total, soft, limited—as too tidy to contain what actually happened on the ground.

Don't Know Much About the Civil War

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Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0061806730
Total Pages : 781 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (618 download)

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Book Synopsis Don't Know Much About the Civil War by : Kenneth C. Davis

Download or read book Don't Know Much About the Civil War written by Kenneth C. Davis and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Highly informative and entertaining…propels the reader light years beyond dull textbooks and Gone with the Wind.” —San Francisco Chronicle It has been 150 years since the opening salvo of America’s War Between the States. New York Times bestselling author Ken Davis tells us everything we never knew about our nation’s bloodiest conflict in Don’t Know Much About ® the Civil War—another fascinating and fun installment in his acclaimed series.

Valley of the Shadow

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393046045
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (46 download)

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Book Synopsis Valley of the Shadow by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book Valley of the Shadow written by Edward L. Ayers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With cutting-edge technology that makes full use of both a multi-platform CD-ROM and the Web, "The Valley of the Shadow" allows readers to navigate the past through Civil War letters, diaries, images, and music to explore two communities in America's Great Valley separated by only a few hundred miles yet on opposite sides of a desperate conflict. Photos & maps.

The Fall of the House of Dixie

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Publisher : Random House Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 1400067030
Total Pages : 481 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Fall of the House of Dixie by : Bruce C. Levine

Download or read book The Fall of the House of Dixie written by Bruce C. Levine and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2013 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionist history of the radical transformation of the American South during the Civil War examines the economic, social and political deconstruction and rebuilding of Southern institutions as experienced by everyday people. By the award-winning author of Confederate Emancipation.