Best civil war gettysburg history books according to redditors

The majority absolutely recognized that they were being treated unfairly. I think it's probably easiest to see this by reading through any number of the slave narratives that are out there. Many of these were funded by Northern abolitionists/anti-slavery activists during the war.

During the war itself, thousands of enslaved people left the plantations and headed toward Union lines. Many ended up in contraband camps, and many of the men fought as part of the USCT. I don't think they would have put themselves and their families at risk if they believed what their captors believed to be true about them.

After the war, the Great Migration caused thousands to leave their homes for a better life in the North and in Canada. They knew that they would never have been able to make lives for themselves while still living in the South. They sent their young daughters north to cities like Washington, DC to become domestics and hopefully get education and live the American dream.

There are a lot of resources available if you want to learn more. The WPA narratives of the 1930s provide a lot of insight into what many people went through. I believe you can download most for free on iBooks (if you've got an Apple device). iBooks has a lot of other really interesting things for free, like testimonies from anti-slavery societies, etc. A great (and short) read is a book called Our Nig, which is a narrative written by a "free" woman living in New Hampshire during the antebellum period, who is virtually enslaved via indentured servitude. Another is called Aunt Sally: or, The Cross the Way of Freedom which is about a woman enslaved in the deep south who is eventually purchased by her son, some 20 years after she last saw him. There are, of course, thousands of scholarly books about this very subject. Chandra Manning wrote a fairly compelling book called What This Cruel War Was Over, which describes the Civil War and the feelings of average people (black and white) about the war and its causes.

There is a section in this book that talks about the behavior of soldiers in combat and how they justify their actions. One thing that really stood out was that soldiers with combat experience generally respected the enemy, and that was especially notable in the prison camps. Soldiers who had not faced combat tended to dehumanize their opponents and treat them worse whereas those who had been in battle tended to treat the prisoners better.


It was really eye opening. You don't think of people in the context of combat and humanized both sides.

Have you read any of the state's declarations of secession? Here's excerpts from Georgia's:

Opening lines: "The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery."

It literally cites the growth of a political party committed to abolition of slavery as the main reason to break away from the Union: "The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation."

The big problem, according to Georgia, is that the North has become increasingly anti-slavery. They also cite the argument (a straw man, given how racist most everyone was in 1861) that abolitionists favor racial equality in addition to abolition. "The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees it its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers.

With these principles on their banners and these utterances on their lips the majority of the people of the North demand that we shall receive them as our rulers.

The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization."

"Slave" or "slavery" appear 35 times in the document. "Right" appears only 7. "Nullification" appears 0. I'd be interested to hear any historians' opinions you can offer on the Nullification Crisis, which occurred in Andrew Jackson's presidency, was the main cause for a war 30 years later. I studied history in undergrad and took a Civil War history course. Almost every historian we read, especially anyone writing after 1930, cited slavery as the primary cause for the war. I would recommend anyone curious about what individual soldiers felt to check out Manning's What This Cruel War Was Over, which combs through hundreds of primary source letters, memoirs, etc. from soldiers and officers from both sides. Amazon link here.

You're probably thinking of William Frassanito's Gettysburg: A Journey In Time and subsequent books. Frassanito has written extensively on Civil War photography, and based on his findings the way the gun, hat, etc are placed in this photo it is most certainly staged. Many Civil War era photographers were interested in making images they could weave into a human interest story which would in turn sell more photos, albums of their work, etc. http://www.amazon.com/Gettysburg-Journey-William-A-Frassanito/dp/0939631970

The most-often recommended single volume is Battle Cry of Freedom.

If Gettysburg is an interest, I found Hallowed Ground by the same author to be a good read. More exhaustive is Sears's Gettysburg, which helped me to understand a very dynamic picture.

Finally, we often get inquiries about the roots of the war. The Pulitzer Prize winning
Impending Crisis is first-rate.

Yeah, maybe they got bit by a pit once. My mom was attacked by a golden retriever and for a quite while afterwords she was understandably leery of goldies. The difference being that golden retrievers aren't vilified in popular culture due to their association with dog fighting.

Here's a really good book on the topic.

The best all encompassing book on the civil war is "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson. It can be a little dry and reads a little bit like a textbook. This one may be a little bit of a "deep dive" but it certainly is the best overall book IMO.

I think the best book for you personally would be a coffee table book put out by the Smithsonian titled, "The Civil War. A Visual History". https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Visual-History/dp/1465429573
I think since you are someone that normally isn't into this stuff, a book with a lot of visual depictions will keep you more interested. It is a book that you can pick up and just kinda glance over here and there rather than a dry text that would be best read cover to cover.

Another suggestion would be to skip the books and watch a documentary such as "Ken Burn's Civil War". I believe that's on Netflix. It's by far the most well known documentary on the subject and it's very well done. It is not perfect from the historian perspective, but it's still great.

Another non-book suggestion would be the videos put on YouTube by the Civil War Trust. This one is on the entire war: https://youtu.be/ZmxfJqxwVIs
They also put out some quick "Civil War in 4 minutes" videos that go over different topics briefly. They are very informative despite their short length. https://youtu.be/v5pWc1_8mU4


Hope this helps. I'm on mobile so I'm sorry if this is a bit poorly formatted.

> is it not true that the soldiers of the South, mostly poor, non slave owners, were fighting more for Southern pride and less for Slavery?

Honestly, not really. The idea of "Southern pride" as a principal motivator is correct in the abstract, inasmuch as individuals talked about the slights to Southern dignity and identity posed by the Union, but it has been greatly exaggerated in the years post-Appomattox compared to what folks actually said and wrote during the sectional conflict. We tend to underestimate the degree to which soldiers were aware of the conflict around them or motivated by "bigger" concepts that personal security or honor; the truth is that many Confederate soldiers were explicitly aware that slavery was the source of the division between North and South, and in particular that preserving slavery against Northern attempts to diminish it was the reason the Confederacy had seceded in the first place. The seceding states all said as much explicitly in their declarations of secession, which were widely published and disseminated among the Confederate civilian and military population.

Southern whites had a strong vested interest in the perpetuation of slavery as a foundation of their culture, because it gave them a) an explicit position in the social hierarchy that was above blacks, and b) was a possibility to which they could aspire economically. Even if they didn't own slaves, they were still better than slaves because they were free, and they could still treat slaves more poorly than they could fellow whites because slaves lacked rights. This was commonly understood and fairly deeply ingrained throughout Southern culture, which is everyone from merchants (exploiting cheap labor without compensation) to politicians (benefiting from the additional 60% boost in federal representation for the slave population granted by the Constitution) to religious leaders (preaching the Biblical justifications of slavery) throughout the South supporting the institution.

The "common man" was often fighting out of patriotism (both Northern and Southern soldiers write often about the feeling of national pride that compelled them to enlist), but also because of conscription. In either case, though, it's important to remember what that patriotism was founded in, and what conscripted soldiers thought they were being conscripted for. In the North, soldiers generally felt at the beginning that preserving the Union was the major reason they should fight, but the North had been radicalizing toward abolition through the 1850s, and by the middle of the war emancipation was an explicitly accepted and agreed-with goal for most Northern troops. Conscripts would have understood these causes as well, because they would have read what their governments told them.

Southern patriotism wasn't concerned with "regional pride" in the abstract, but with what Southern culture was - namely, an apartheid state based in the subjugation of blacks as a race. If Southerners were fighting for pride, that was what they were proud of. There wasn't really a "trick" insofar as the centrality of slavery is concerned, although we can have a question about whether poor Southern whites weren't better off after emancipation anyway because it robbed the plantation barons of their primary source of wealth (which was re-constituted anyway under Jim Crow sharecropping).

I highly recommend the book What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning. From the book's description: "Manning ignores the writings of elites and emphasizes the opinions of common soldiers, North and South, white and black. [. . .] Although acknowledging that many Union soldiers enlisted to preserve the Union rather than to fight slavery, she asserts that both slavery and emancipation were constant topics of discussion as early as 1861. She disputes that nonslaveholding Confederate soldiers (who were the overwhelming majority) fought primarily to defend hearth and home from Yankee invaders. Rather, she maintains that the defense of slavery was intimately tied to their sense of manhood, honor, and their place in the Southern social structures." She pretty conclusively demonstrates that both North and South understood that they were fighting because of slavery, and that Southern soldiers believed that defending the slavery system was vital to their own self-interest.

As for the subject of respecting the soldiers who fought the war, I'm not particularly concerned. We can honor our ancestors without glorifying them, and monuments to Confederate soldiers end up implying that the cause of the conflict was worth honoring as much as the individuals. Bravery is cheap; when there are more monuments to Southern Unionists (of which there were many, almost never honored with monuments in the South today) or abolitionists (who risked everything for their ideals in a hostile region) or the slaves themselves (who are more deserving of honor than anyone), then perhaps it will be worth erecting a few for the Confederate soldiers who died fighting to preserve slavery.

Someone literally wrote a book on it:

https://www.amazon.com/Pit-Bull-Battle-over-American/dp/0307961761

https://splinternews.com/the-racist-story-behind-the-pit-bull-s-fall-from-americ-1793857029

https://www.amazon.com/Pit-Bull-Battle-over-American/dp/0307961761

Check this book out for well researched and written information about myths and misconceptions about pitbulls.

Check out Pit Bull: the Battle over an American Icon, it does a great job at explaining where all of those awful prejudices came from and how ineffective breed bans are.


It's a really good read, too. I've suggested to people in locales like yours to start a kickstarter to send the book to their municipal government, maybe change a few minds.

https://www.amazon.com/What-This-Cruel-War-Over/dp/0307277321/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543587922&sr=8-1&keywords=What+This+Cruel+War+Was+Over%3A+Soldiers%2C+Slavery%2C+and+the+Civil+War

It's based entirely on written primary material if you're interested in the topic.

New Amazon recommendation for you

The Civil War Trust, a group dedicated to preserving battlefields, has a really good map section. Some of them are even animated.

http://www.civilwar.org/maps/animated-maps/

You can also check the NPS sites for various battlefields, as they sometimes have good maps.

This book is also pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Civil-War-Complete-Tactics/dp/1426203470/ref=pd_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=61TsRd1h-jL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR122%2C160_&refRID=08882N170JEKS439HZDE

You can alwAys just do a quick Google search, too.

Also a HS US teacher here: I don't think you know the Civil War until you have read those books. For me it goes quick because it is written in almost novel form. Mr. Foote was not a historian, he was a novelist and it really comes out in the books. There aren't a lot of footnotes for example. To me it comes across as a story. I have been picking it up and putting it down for about 10 years now. I can't sit and drown in Civil War for that long. I need some WWII or some fiction.
He also has broken some chapters out, like the Gettysburg chapter into its own book. Its the chapter, just in a book.
Stars in Their Courses : The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863
or The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get a good idea of the reasons soldiers went to war and also just some exposure to some of the ideologies that underpin modern society. It's actually pretty crazy how wrong public perception is regarding the war; everyone is wrong. There's also an uncomfortable number of problems that were present then that are still present now.

https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Soldiers-Reid-Mitchell/dp/0140263330

Richard Holfstradter has a good collection of the Lincoln Douglas debates.

Another great work published in 1963 that still applies today.

For anyone is interested, there is a recent book on Pit Bulls that I just finished reading called, "Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon", by Bronwen Dickey. It details many stigmatizing laws that have been enacted, and how they are based on urban legends, pseudoscience, and fear mongering.

The book was well-written, thoroughly researched, and tells a very compelling story of how the most beloved and popular dog breeds in the US and Europe became the most demonized and dangerous of dog - and how the role of humans played a major role in that transformation.

Granted, it's a bit America-centered, but maybe send a copy to some Canadian government officials just the same?

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Pit-Bull-Battle-over-American-ebook/dp/B013ZNK5HG/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1

Great Answer. The only other book I would add would be the Army War College's book on the battle. It forms the basis of the Army's staff ride and is probably the best book you could bring with you to the site. Its designed to be take you on a guided tour of the battlefield and might not make much sense if you dont see the land opening up before you. But its worth having.

Just read an awesome book called Lincoln at Gettysburg that outlines a lot of the political and cultural motivations that went into the Gettysburg Address. It also covers a lot about how Lincoln felt about the war at the time, and the language he used to describe it. Also check out The New York City Draft Riots. This book, in addition to telling a really interesting story about what happened those few days in New York in 1863, it also provides an interesting perspective of what Bernstein calls "The Lincoln Regime", and the centralization of federal Republican power during that time.

Can anyone recommend any books about the aftermath of the explosion? I read an account of Gettysburg after the battle and it was far more interesting than the books recounting the battle itself. I imagine the Halifax disaster would be as captivating.

The beauty of Gettysburg is that there is very little contemporary development around; no skyscrapers or bridges near by. I appreciate that (these battlefields) is one of the few places where the scene you're looking at is pretty close to what the soldiers saw. The trees are different, but it's pretty close.

I got this book, and it was fun to take around the battlefields

https://www.amazon.com/Gettysburg-Then-Now-Touring-Battlefield/dp/1577470036/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=gettysburg+now+and+then+photo&qid=1573670936&sr=8-1

If you haven't read John Avlons book on Washington you should. Its a great read and goes a bit into the religious beliefs of some of the Founders.

You're so sensitive.

This thread among historians may be interesting to read:
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yoyys/your_opinion_how_accurate_is_it_to_say_the_civil/?sort=top

I like this comment:

>I like to say that, to someone who learned about the civil from high school, the civil war was about slavery. To someone who took civil war history as an undergrad the war was about conflicting economic systems, tariffs, regional cultural differences, or something else. And that to the grad student studying the war, it was about slavery.

I've also heard good things about this book:

http://www.amazon.com/What-This-Cruel-War-Over/dp/0307277321

If you're interested to know why those statistics aren't valid and why everything surrounding pit bulls is as it is check out Pit Bull by Browen Dickey

Most people think they're looking at a pit bull anytime they see a dog with short hair, muscular body, and a blocky head.

Even people who work with dogs for a living are unable to reliably identify breeds by sight (http://stories.barkpost.com/study-proves-difficult-visually-identify-pit-bulls/). What often happens is that a dog that has attacked is labeled a "pit bull" because people expect pit bulls to be vicious. The breed designation of the offending dog is most often made by a journalist, a cop or a witness, and almost never by genetic testing.

This exhaustive book outlines the many ways pit bulls are maligned in popular imagination, and gives a fascinating look back at the "bad dog" breeds of past generations, for any who have interest: https://www.amazon.com/Pit-Bull-Battle-over-American/dp/0307961761

Earlier this week, I ordered the 2nd and 3rd and this one. I've read many, many positive reviews on the second book, so I figured it was something worth looking into.

Hey! I found the book!

I think trying to equate the prejudice towards dogs over the discrimination actual people face is at best tone deaf and at worst a bit insulting, but the general idea is actually a fairly accepted history of why views towards pitbulls shifted.

There's a good book here that examines this issue and explains how the rise of pitbull popularity among black and latino groups corresponded to the rise in negative attitudes towards pitbulls, and they note a lot of the parallels of how they're characterised as a result of this association.

Buy this book Insiders' Guide® to Gettysburg (Insiders' Guide Series) by Kate Hertzog. I've just started reading this book because I plan to visit Gettysburg this summer. So far it seems to offer extremely detailed information, including the exits off Route 15 which pertains to my trip. The information on the airports was also very detailed. It was published way back in 2009 so it may be a little out-of-date, but you probably won't find anything more current.

Mark Boatner, Civil War Dictionary this a basic research tool for any CW historian.

What is WC?

I watched some of the 9/11 video. Self-sacrifice is associated with goodness, but then the Islamic terrorists also practiced self-sacrifice, so self-sacrifice by itself isn't enough. Good judgement is also needed. Also, 2000 was still better than now. There probably were some good people at that time, it is only in the last few years that I have seen all traces of goodness disappear.

Romans 12:2 is something I quote to Christians all the time (at least I did when I dealt with them). Of course I wish Christians would follow this, but only traditional Anabaptists seem to. Mainstream Christianity is completely conformed to this age.

I haven't read "Night" by Elie Wiesel. I know enough about this topic since most of family died in the Holocaust and my father escaped from a Nazi work camp and then fought, blowing up German trains. Individuals can make the most difference when there is open war between good and evil, by siding with good. But when one is surrounded by ubiquitous evil, as in modern culture, it is much harder to make a difference.

Ancient Israel was a case of constant conflict between good and evil with good generally being the minority. Still, at least there always seemed to be at least one prophet of good, which is better than today.

Most of what Jesus says is consistent with the Old Testament, and his opinion of Solomon is no exception. Solomon clearly violated Deuteronomy 17:14-20.

I didn't write much about the New Testament because modern Christianity doesn't work. But here is one thing I wrote:

http://www.mikraite.org/Who-is-my-neighbor-tp481.html

About history, please don't waste your time on YouTube and on history books. Only original sources have value. Here are some books that you may find interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Reformation-Reader-Primary-Texts-Introductions/dp/0800663101/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002GJGIDQ/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1607961806/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140444203/

https://www.amazon.com/002-American-History-Revolution-1765-1865/dp/0394705416/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394708423/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140455280/

To understand the world wars, probably the best book to read is Mein Kampf.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004LDLI0S/

Like with religion, one has to get as close to the source as possible in history to find truth.

Read Gary Wills' Lincoln At Gettysburg, one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. Wills claims, and supports, that Lincoln successfully set out to re-formulate the relationship between the American people and our government. If nothing else, it is a great example of how to really read a text.

There's no simple answer, largely because the data doesn't exist, but if you'd like a very thorough understanding of everything pit bulls, I'd recommend the book Pit Bull: Battle Over an American Icon