Civil War recommendations?

[Mike L]

One of the things that Prof. Blight mentioned in the Yale course was that the American Civil War is the most written-about event in world history. Over 65 thousand separate books have been published about it, not to mention any number of articles, monographs, etc.

By my reckoning, that's 1.2 books published per day since the end of the war.

Mike

[LovesMacs]

With all the recommendations for Shelby Foote's trilogy, I may just take that on after I finish Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm about halfway through that book, so I have a lot of reading ahead of me.

I think I'm too busy right now to try an Open Yale course, but I will keep in mind for the future. Isn't the Ken Burns series being sold on DVD through online retailers?

Thanks for all the recommendations, keep 'em coming!

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by LovesMacs

Isn't the Ken Burns series being sold on DVD through online retailers?

Yes. It seems to be easy to buy in the US, but as Region 1 DVDs, which we can't view in Europe.

Actually, since I last checked, I see that Amazon is selling a Region 2 version in the UK. It cost about £43, which seems quite expensive. Then again, I guess that's about US$70, which is comparable with the US prices.

Mike

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by LovesMacs

With all the recommendations for Shelby Foote's trilogy, I may just take that on after I finish Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm about halfway through that book, so I have a lot of reading ahead of me.

I think I'm too busy right now to try an Open Yale course, but I will keep in mind for the future. Isn't the Ken Burns series being sold on DVD through online retailers?

Thanks for all the recommendations, keep 'em coming!

It's also on netflix streaming if you have that.

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by LovesMacs

With all the recommendations for Shelby Foote's trilogy, I may just take that on after I finish Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm about halfway through that book, so I have a lot of reading ahead of me.

I think I'm too busy right now to try an Open Yale course, but I will keep in mind for the future. Isn't the Ken Burns series being sold on DVD through online retailers?

Thanks for all the recommendations, keep 'em coming!

The Ken Burns series is also available on Amazon Prime, I just watched it over the last 2 weeks.

[stonetools]

AH Freelings's The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 is a great detailed discussion of the historical events leading up to the Civil War. The War was a long time coming and really was a possibility even from the founding of the USA.

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by stonetools

The War was a long time coming and really was a possibility even from the founding of the USA.

That's certainly a theme of McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, where he traces the story back to the Missouri Compromise, and even the Louisana Purchase.

Mike

[stonetools]

There's a lot of debate, both in writing and online, on whether the CW could have been avoided and whether the South could have won.
Harry Turtledove wrote a whole series of books based on the South winning and fighting a series of other civil wars with the surviving USA.

Southern Victory series

[HansTWN]

What about books covering Reconstruction?

[Xanthe]

Not non-fiction, but doesn't Gore Vidal have some books set in the Reconstruction?

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

What about books covering Reconstruction?

There are lots of books on the Reconstruction On my Wish List is this recent one:

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II



LINK

[Jozawun]

The definitive work on The Civil War remains, of course Christopher Hill's The Century of Revolution 1603-1704.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by JOZAWUN

The definitive work on The Civil War remains, of course Christopher Hill's The Century of Revolution 1603-1704.

Yes, and I have been meaning to learn more about that. And I'm finding your book available through our state-wide Access Pennsylvania public library system. But it seems primarily intended for PC reading. The user interface seemingly intends to allow sending to an @kindle.com address in 30 page blocks, but it isn't working for me; I would have to transfer it to my Kindle one page at a time. And, looking at that first page, author Christopher Hill gets off to an amaziningly slow start:

The arrangement of this book calls for a word of explanation. In order
to avoid repeating at length what can be found in many textbooks, and
to have more space for attempts at explanation, I have, in the narrative
chapters, given merely a bald summary of events. The reader should be
patient when, for instance, he finds ‘the Cokayne Project’ mentioned
without explanation on p. 10. It is discussed at length on pp. 34–5.

I think I'll look further

[Jozawun]

Yes, well he was a Marxist teaching at Oxford, probably thought he had to explain things very slowly to the sons of the landed gentry.

[Mike L]

The Yale course that I mentioned earlier deals with Reconstruction in some depth. In fact, about a third of the course is solely concerned with that period.

A topic which I would like to read more about is the foreign policies of the two sides, and in particular, the attempts by the Confederacy to gain recognition of the big European powers (and the attempts by the Union to stop them). McPherson does cover that, but I don't recall seeing it discussed much in any of the other books I've read.

Mike