James McPherson’s top five books on the Civil War away from the battlefield
The Wall Street Journal has published a series of “Five Best” book lists in various subjects this month, including books on financial meltdowns and books on the history of medicine. This week’s list offers Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M. McPherson‘s top five books about the Civil War away from the battlefield.
Of the five books on McPherson’s list, one is published by UNC Press and three more are by authors that have published other books with us! UNCP has got the who’s who among Civil War scholars. Follow me after the jump to get the lowdown.
Number four on McPherson’s list is The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865, by Alice Fahs, which is available from UNCP in hardcover and paperback editions. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a torrent of war-related works, including poems, songs, children’s stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Mining these rich but long-neglected sources, Fahs demonstrates that instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals–including African Americans–to the nation.
Other books on the list include This Republic of Suffering (Knopf), by Drew Gilpin Faust; Southern Lady, Yankee Spy (Oxford), by Elizabeth R. Varon; and Civil Wars (Illinois), by George Rable.
Drew Gilpin Faust, who is president of Harvard University, is also author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, published by UNC Press and available in hardcover and paperback. This is one of our perennial top sellers. Winner of several awards, it’s become a heavily adopted textbook for college courses.
Elizabeth R. Varon’s latest book, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, is hitting bookstores now. This is the inaugural volume in the new Littlefield History of the Civil War Era series, which marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The series is a project of UNC Press and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History at the Unviersity of Texas at Austin.
George Rable has published a couple of books with UNC Press, the most recent of which is Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!, winner of several awards, including the Lincoln Prize.
Congratulations to all these authors!
–ellen