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Fair-minded and comprehensive, C. Mildred Thompson’s RECONSTRUCTION IN GEORGIA (1915) has long been considered among the best of the state studies to emerge from Columbia University’s Dunning School. This coterie of graduate students in Professor William A. Dunning’s famed Reconstruction seminar produced studies of Reconstruction in their native states. Widely admired and appreciatively reviewed in their time, they were increasingly pilloried by revisionist scholars after mid-century. This new edition reintroduces Thompson’s classic to new readers as the Reconstruction Sesquicentennial gets underway. It corrects the major flaw of the original by including a full index, and also offers a detailed biographical sketch of the author.

AN EDGEFIELD PLANTER AND HIS WORLD opens a window on the life of an elite family and its circle in a now iconic place, during a crystalizing decade of the Antebellum era. By the time he began a new diary volume in 1840, Brooks (1790-1851) was among the richest men in a South Carolina district known for its cotton-and-slave-generated wealth. His journal reveals Brooks’s attentiveness to his plantation and farms, self-image as a paternal master, religious sensibility, genteel but honor-bound bearing, personal and family connections, perspective on politics, and the effects of debilitating headaches.

Cecilia Lawton's life was changed forever when the bloodiest war in American history began in 1861. The daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, she was married at the age of sixteen and went to live at her husband's plantation in South Carolina, but a few months later, she found herself fleeing from the army of General William T. Sherman as it ravaged the state. She observed the aftermath of this brutal campaign in Georgia and South Carolina, writing of what she saw in vivid, horrific detail. Told in her own words, this is the true story of Cecilia Lawton, a young woman who faced incredible challenges with determination and courage.

Gone With the Wind is one of the most beloved novels and movies of all time. Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel has sold millions of copies world-wide and has been translated into numerous languages. This photographic essay contains photographs of the stars, of Atlanta before, during, and after the premiere event, and of the citizens of the city who turned out not just for the movie but for receptions, the premiere ball, and other events. From movie stars to horse-drawn carriages, from a transformed theater to Gone With the Wind merchandise, this is the book that takes you back to an event often neglected in the Gone With the Wind story.

In this work, the first of two volumes, Hood's rise in rank is chronicled. In three years, 1861-1864, Hood rose from lieutenant to full general in the Confederate army. Davis emphasizes Hood's fatal flaw: ambition. Hood constantly sought promotion, even after he had found his highest level of competence as division commander in Robert E. Lee’s army. As corps commander in the Army of Tennessee, his performance was good, but no better. Promoted to succeed Johnston, Hood did his utmost to defend Atlanta against Sherman. In this latter effort he failed. But he had won his spurs, even if he had been denied greatness as a general.

Based upon a thousand-page daily plantation journal which was kept during the tumultuous years from 1850-1885, it is a compelling story of how a Southern planter and his family in Alabama survived and prospered in those critical years. Of special significance is the account of daily events of the Civil War years and the post-war years of rebuilding and recovery.

This book is about war’s impact on the religious faith of individual Confederate Christian soldiers. The tribulations of war drove these men to new spiritual heights; and after the war, these men took up leadership positions in their postwar churches. This study closely traces the spiritual progression of nine individual Christian soldiers.

When the Civil War began in 1861, thousands of volunteers rallied to the colors to defend their families, their homes, and the Union—or the Confederacy—as they chose. Comparatively few of these patriotic young men were trained veterans of military campaigns or graduates of a military academy. Before hundreds of regiments marched off to war, John Penn Curry, a veteran of Indian campaigns in the West and a former US Navy officer, wrote a practical handbook for soldiers to help them survive the hardships of life in the field.

The Spirit Divided is a collection of letters, reports, and recollections in which Union army chaplains describe their motives and methods, their failures and achievements. Some threw away their somber black uniforms and became dashing staff officers. Scorning these “chaplains militant,” others were, in the words of a battlefield journalist, “bearers of the cup of cold water and the word of good cheer.

In the 1980s, Army Chaplain Corps adopted the credo “Nurture the living. / Care for the wounded. / Honor the dead.” It summarizes more than 200 years of chaplain ministry with soldiers during war and peace. C. T. Quintard’s Soldier’s Pocket Manual of Devotions was one Civil War chaplain’s expression of the hope and faith on which the credo is built. In 1861, Chaplain Quintard of the 1st Tennessee Regiment marched off to care for his soldiers as they joined the Army of Virginia. His Soldier’s Pocket Manual of Devotions was a very popular and widely distributed devotional manual used by many Confederate soldiers.

In this anthology of Civil War memoirs, we get a clearer impression of some of the chaplains who served during that Great Conflict. Chaplains were among the most omnipresent observers on the battlefield, and some wrote extensively about their experiences. Eighty-seven of the 3,695 chaplains who served in both armies wrote regimental histories or published personal memoirs, not counting a multitude of letters and more than 300 official reports. Yet, there has never been an extensive collection of memoirs from chaplains of both the Confederate and Union armies presented together. In this groundbreaking work, many of the Confederate chaplains write that they opposed secession and submitted to it only when war was inevitable. Moreover, some of the ministers who became chaplains were active in ministry to black slaves. They spoke out against the neglect and abuse of those held in bondage both before and during the war. For example, Reverend John L. Girardeau formed a large mission church for slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, before the war; Reverend Isaac Tichenor criticized the abuses of the slave system before the Alabama Legislature in 1863; and Chaplain Charles Oliver preached to black laborers in the Army of Northern Virginia in 1864 with the thought that more needed to be done for them. While these efforts may appear trivial in the face of the enormity of the entire slave system, they do reflect that a social conscience was not completely lacking among the Southern chaplains. From the battlefield to the pulpit, Confederate chaplains were surprising and complex individuals. For the first time, explore this aspect of the great struggle in each chaplain’s own words.

SOUTHSIDE relates the stories of the cotton mill workers and their families who lived and worked in Eufaula, Alabama, a small town on the Chattahoochee River, from the 1890s through 1945. Utilizing previously unpublished family records, oral histories, and other primary sources, author David Alsobrook relates the stories of the lives of these ordinary mill families—their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies. Many of the photographs that appear in Southside are from personal family collections and have never been seen previously. Alsobrook’s chapter on legendary mill owner Donald Comer presents a fresh assessment of this remarkably enlightened corporate executive and his own particular brand of paternalism, which differed significantly from the philosophy of many of his contemporaries in the Southern textile industry.