Product Description: A slave determined to gain freedom, a widow battling poverty and despair, a man of God grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. They lived in the South during 1865—a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation...read more

An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American historyIn May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed people had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks―and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history. Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism. Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War–era history like no other.

Product Description: Large numbers of slaves worked for the Confederate war effort as wagon drivers, munitions factory workers, and officers’ body servants. But contrary to popular wisdom, the number that actually bore arms for the Confederacy was negligible...read more

Product Description: A nearly forgotten Civil War episode is restored to history in this masterful account. In March 1863, nine hundred black Union soldiers, led by white officers, invaded Florida and seized the town of Jacksonville. They were among the first African American troops in the Northern army, and their expedition into enemy territory was like no other in the Civil War...read more

Product Description: Originally published in 1988, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed marks a significant advance in the social history of the American Civil War—an approach exemplified and extended in Ash’s later work and that of other leading Civil War scholars...read more

Product Description: Paul H. Bergeron joined the University of Tennessee History Department in 1972 and retired three decades later, widely recognized as one of our country’s premier scholars of nineteenth-century political history. In addition to his meticulous scholarship—his career included editorship of both the Correspondence of James K...read more

The pivotal year in American history is revealed through the lives of four Southerners--minister Samuel Agnew, slave Louis Hughes, widow Cornelia McDonald, and Confederate soldier John Robertson--who provide stunning eyewitness accounts of some of the most important events in the American story. Reprint. (view table of contents)

The pivotal year in American history is revealed through the lives of four southerners--Samuel Agnew, Louis Hughes, Cornelia McDonald, and John Robertson--who provide stunning eyewitness accounts of some of the most important events in the American story.

Product Description: The history of Tennessee is full of dramatic episodes and colorful characters that give the Volunteer State a major place in the American saga. From the bloody battle of Shiloh in 1862 to the Dayton "monkey trial" of 1925 to the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968, Tennessee has been the locale for many of America's most important events...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Southerners whose communities were invaded by the Union army during the Civil War endured a profoundly painful ordeal. For most, the coming of the Yankees was a nightmare become real; for some, it was the answer to a prayer. But as Stephen Ash argues, for all, invasion and occupation were essential parts of the experience of defeat that helped shape the southern postwar mentality...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)