Project Muse is making hundreds of books from the University of North Carolina Press about the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras free online. Yesterday I gave you links to some of the newest books of interest to my readers. Today I offer you links to many classic Civil War and Reconstruction books by people like Earl Hess, Peter S. Carmichael, and Harry Pfanz.
The entire catalog of the University of North Carolina Press is available as free downloads. You can find the list of all of the free books from UNC Press here. They cover many subjects.
I am including the title and publication date, a link to the free download in the title, and a description of the book supplied by UNC press for many of the books, as well as a long list of books it would have taken me too long to go through individually. If you have never downloaded from Project Muse, I provide an easy explanation of how to do so at the bottom of this list.
- Gettysburg–The Second Day
- 1987
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Gettysburg–Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill
- 1993
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Gettysburg–The First Day
- 2001
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West
- 1992
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory
- 1997
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- 2019
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
France’s involvement in the American Civil War was critical to its unfolding, but the details of the European power’s role remain little understood. Here, Steve Sainlaude offers the first comprehensive history of French diplomatic engagement with the Union and the Confederate States of America during the conflict. Drawing on archival sources that have been neglected by scholars up to this point, Sainlaude overturns many commonly held assumptions about French relations with the Union and the Confederacy. As Sainlaude demonstrates, no major European power had a deeper stake in the outcome of the conflict than France.
Reaching beyond the standard narratives of this history, Sainlaude delves deeply into questions of geopolitical strategy and diplomacy during this critical period in world affairs. The resulting study will help shift the way Americans look at the Civil War and extend their understanding of the conflict in global context.
To understand the long march of events in North Carolina from secession to surrender is to understand the entire Civil War–a personal war waged by Confederates and Unionists, free blacks and the enslaved, farm women and plantation belles, Cherokees and mountaineers, conscripts and volunteers, gentleman officers and poor privates. In the state’s complex loyalties, its sprawling and diverse geography, and its dual role as a home front and a battlefield, North Carolina embodies the essence of the whole epic struggle in all its terrible glory.
Philip Gerard presents this dramatic convergence of events through the stories of the individuals who endured them–reporting the war as if it were happening in the present rather than with settled hindsight–to capture the dreadful suspense of lives caught up in a conflict whose ending had not yet been written.
As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln’s proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly.
In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery’s end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals’ sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences.
The New Deal era witnessed a surprising surge in popular engagement with the history and memory of the Civil War era. From the omnipresent book and film Gone with the Wind and the scores of popular theater productions to Aaron Copeland’s “A Lincoln Portrait,” it was hard to miss America’s fascination with the war in the 1930s and 1940s. Nina Silber deftly examines the often conflicting and politically contentious ways in which Americans remembered the Civil War era during the years of the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. In doing so, she reveals how the debates and events of that earlier period resonated so profoundly with New Deal rhetoric about state power, emerging civil rights activism, labor organizing and trade unionism, and popular culture in wartime.
At the heart of this book is an examination of how historical memory offers people a means of understanding and defining themselves in the present.
- Capitalism and Slavery
- 2014
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- The Military Memoirs of General John Pope
- 2000
- Published by: The University of North Carolina Press
- Series: Civil War America
misunderstood figures to hold major command during the Civil War.
Before being called east in June 1862 to lead the Army of Virginia against General Robert E. Lee, he compiled an enviable record in Missouri and as commander of the Army of the Mississippi. After his ignominious defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, he was sent to the frontier. Over the next twenty-four years Pope held important department commands on the western plains and was recognized as one of the army’s leading authorities on Indian affairs, but he never again commanded troops in battle.
Using the Free Books:
If you follow the links to the free books you will see something like this:
Beneath the description of the book you will see “Table of Contents.”
Each chapter is a separate download. You click on the download and you can read the chapter online. You can also save the download onto your device. Ignore the “Save” button on the Project Muse page, though, it saves the chapter to your Muse cloud, which you probably don’t have.
Good luck and I will be back with more free books tomorrow.
