This volume integrates the military and social histories of the American Civil War in its chapter organization. Its contributors use war and society methods: a holistic approach to understanding war and its consequences that incorporates the topics and techniques of a variety of historical subfields. Each chapter narrates a military campaign embedded in its strategic, political, and social context. Authors explore the consequences of a military campaign for the people who lived in its path and provide analysis of how an army’s presence reverberated throughout society in its region of operation.

The volume yields a number of important insights about the impact of military campaigns, including the scale of movement, deportation, and depopulation among civilians; how the refugee experience and military action shaped emancipation as a process; the extent of guerrilla warfare; resistance to federal authority in the Great Plains and the Southwest; locations of localized total war; the implementation of military conscription in the Confederacy; a campaign’s consequences for cities, rural areas, and the natural environment; and the synergy between war and politics. Chapters consider the role of weather, topography, logistics, and engineering in the conduct of military campaigns.

Published by:

Oxford University Press