Despite the advances of the civil rights movement, many white southerners cling to the faded glory of a romanticized Confederate past. In The Making of a Confederate, William L. Barney focuses on the life of one man, Walter Lenoir of North Carolina, to examine the origins of southern white identity alongside its myriad ambiguities and complexities. Born into a wealthy slaveholding family, Lenoir abhorred the institution, opposed secession, and planned to leave his family to move to Minnesota, in the free North. But when the war erupted in 1860, Lenoir found another escape route--he joined the Confederate army, an experience that would radically transform his ideals. After the war, Lenoir, like many others, embraced the cult of the Lost Cause, refashioning his memory and beliefs in an attempt to make sense of the war, its causes, and its consequences. While some Southerners sank into depression, aligned with the victors, or fiercely opposed the new order, Lenoir withdrew to his acreage in the North Carolina mountains. There, he pursued his own vision of the South's future, one that called for greater self-sufficiency and a more efficient use of the land.For Lenoir and many fellow Confederates, the war never really ended. As he tells this compelling story, Barney offers new insights into the ways that (selective) memory informs history; through Lenoir's life, readers learn how individual choices can transform abstract historical processes into concrete actions.

Product Description: To know history is to love history–This highly visual survey of U.S. History introduces students to the key features of American political, social, and economic history in a exciting new format designed to ignite in students a passion to know and love history the way that their professors do...read more

Product Description: To know history is to love history—This highly visual survey of U.S. History introduces students to the key features of American political, social, and economic history in a exciting new format designed to ignite in students a passion to know and love history the way that their professors do...read more

Product Description: A Companion to 19th-Century America is an authoritative overview of current historiographical developments and major themes in the history of nineteenth-century America. Twenty-seven scholars, all specialists in their own thematic areas, examine the key debates and historiography...read more

The Description for this book, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860, will be forthcoming.

Entries describing the causes, events, weapons, leaders, and other developments of the Civil War and Reconstruction are accompanied by lists of dates and of museums and historic sites. (view table of contents)

Product Description: For one and two-semester, freshman/sophomore-level U.S. History Survey courses. Written in a clear, engaging style with a straightforward chronological organization, The American Journey introduces students to the key features of American political, social, and economic history...read more

Product Description: ISBN: 0816623643. ** Learning History in America: Schools, Culture, and Politics** by LLoyd kramer, Donold Reid, and William L. Barney, editors. 225 Numbered pages.

Product Description: A broadly interpretive survey of the Civil War and Reconstruction including events leading up to the War and until the 1880's. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book with view of history from the 19th century.