Reconfiguring the Union Civil War Transformations

by Morgan, Iwan W.; Davies, Philip John

• ISBN13: 9781137336477
• ISBN10: 1137336471
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-08-14
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

From the perspective of the North, the Civil War began as a war to restore the Union and ended as a war to make a more perfect Union. The Civil War not only changed the moral meaning of the Union, it changed what the Union stood for in political, economic, and transnational terms. This volume examines the transformations the Civil War brought to the American Union as a politico-constitutional, social, and economic system. It explores how the war changed the meaning of the Union with regard to the supremacy of the federal government over the states, the right of secession, the rights of citizenship, and the political balance between the union's various sections. It further considers the effect of the war on international and transnational perceptions of the United States. Finally, it considers how historical memory has shaped the legacy of the Civil War in the last 150 years.

Author Biography

Iwan W. Morgan is Professor of US Studies and Head of US Programmes at the Institute of the Americas, University College London, UK. A specialist on the presidency, his publications include The Age of Deficits: Presidents and Unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush (2009), winner of the American Politics Group's Richard E. Neustadt prize.

Philip John Davies is Director of the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library, UK. A specialist on American electoral politics, he has also worked on numerous co-edited volumes with Iwan W. Morgan, including From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012).

Table of Contents

1. The Civil War, Democracy and the Union; Adam Smith
2. Lincoln and Emancipation: The Lessons of the Letter to Horace Greeley; Richard Carwardine
3. Freedpeople, Politics and the State in Civil War America; Erik Mathisen
4. The Military Significance of the 1864 Presidential Election; Brian Holden Reid
5. In Union There is Strength:' City-Building and Nation-Building in Civil-War Era Philadelphia, 1844-1865; Andrew Heath
6. 'There Will be Blood:' The Civil War and the Birth of the Oil Industry; Matthew Shaw
7. Faugh a Ballagh! (Clear the Way): The Irish and the American Civil War; David Gleason
8. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and British Views of the Civil War; Amanda Foreman
9. Ordeal of the Union: Alan Nevins, the Civil War Centennial, and the Civil Rights Struggles of the 1960s; Robert Cook
10. Glory, Glory: Hollywood's Consensus Memory of the Civil War; Jenny Barrett