Top products from r/USCivilWar

We found 25 product mentions on r/USCivilWar. We ranked the 49 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Top comments that mention products on r/USCivilWar:

u/cjm427 · 3 pointsr/USCivilWar

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.

u/panzermeyer · 2 pointsr/USCivilWar

It's very well written, reads like a novel. Goes into great detail about the man, his personality, his personal life. And of course his military career and exploits. Very good book.

Also, if you have the time, get yourself this:https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Volumes-1-3-Box/dp/0394749138

Civil War - By Shelby Foote. Best Civil War books I have ever read!

u/stgilesbuzzman · 1 pointr/USCivilWar

Bruce Catton's works introduced me to the ACW. His writing isn't always very thorough from an academic perspective (fewer citations, etc) but his florid prose is a great way to get hooked into the broader Homeric narrative of the conflict and how it plays on the American consciousness. He wrote a few general histories, including the classic 1960 American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (if you want to go the pictorial route). But the best thing of his, to my recollection, is the beautifully-written Army of the Potomac trilogy (Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox), which you can now get in a single volume (https://www.amazon.com/Bruce-Cattons-Lincolns-Stillness-Appomattox/dp/0517447711). Its focus, however, is on the Union's Army of the Potomac, so you only see the war through one side and theater (the Eastern campaigns).

u/CherryNerdsAreBest · 1 pointr/USCivilWar

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.

u/JimH10 · 3 pointsr/USCivilWar

It sounds as though there is a consensus, but I'll also add MacPherson's Crossroads of Freedom, a thinner book, but also very enjoyable.

u/seductus · 2 pointsr/USCivilWar

I’d highly suggest you read his memoirs..

This biography by McDonough was very good.
https://www.amazon.com/William-Tecumseh-Sherman-Service-Country/dp/0393354202

u/Animal40160 · 3 pointsr/USCivilWar

A favorite of mine that I have read several times over is Landscape Turned Red by Stephen W. Sears. It's about Antietam and I always have a hard time putting it down.

u/ekwcawaew · 1 pointr/USCivilWar

Two really good books on the topic are, The Gray and the Black and Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807125571/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195315863/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

u/atomicmarc · 2 pointsr/USCivilWar

Steven Sodergren's "The Army of the Potomac" covers the last year or so of the campaign, but I prefer it because it focuses on the trench warfare aspect. Lee had to resort to prepared positions due to his inferiority in numbers. When Grant couldn't dislodge the Confederates he would simply pull back and try another end run. There are a lot of books condemning Grant's strategy, but I don't know what more he could have had given the situation and Lee's counter-moves.

u/TheHIV123 · 4 pointsr/USCivilWar

Pick up General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse. Very good book on the Army of Northern Virginia.

Here's a link:

https://www.amazon.com/General-Lees-Army-Victory-Collapse/dp/1416596976

u/barkevious2 · 6 pointsr/USCivilWar

The more militaristic and expansionist aspects of pro-slavery politics even spread beyond the official military policy of the Federal government to embrace private military ventures like the filibusterers of the 1850s - e.g., William Walker - and attempts at bully diplomacy in which the United States pressured other countries to cede territory in Central America and the Caribbean destined to become slave states. (The long Cuban controversy and the Ostend Manifesto of 1854 are a good demonstration of the latter.) Our memory of the Knights of the Golden Circle is tainted by their own self-aggrandizement and a bundle of conspiracy theories, but the fact of their existence - and their commitment to the idea of a slave-holding empire ringing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean - is revealing enough.

As many Southerners understood, slavery required expansion in order to survive. The chattel slavery economy did not naturally produce the demographic explosion necessary to sustain its political life in an era when the Northern population was growing exponentially in just that way. Slave-grown cotton sapped the soil, and new agricultural vistas for slavery's consumption were not just desirable but fast becoming necessary by mid-century. Slaves themselves reproduced at a rate sufficient to ensure that they would not die out as a people, but the political and geographic preconditions necessary for the institution's survival were forever uncertain.

Northerners understood this, too. The entire raison d'etre of the Republican Party was to establish a "cordon of freedom" around the institution, which anti-slavery Northerners believed would starve it into submission. (James Oakes' book The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War makes this point quite well.) Southern expansionism was politically palatable to Northerners as long as it was paired with non-slavery expansionism (e.g., the acquisition of Oregon alongside Texas). But the moment it became clear that the acquisition of new territory was not actually a bi-sectional affair, support collapsed. See, for example, widespread opposition in the North to the Mexican War and the Ostend Manifesto.

u/edwardfranks · 1 pointr/USCivilWar

Good book on Robert Cobb Kennedy, who escaped I believe from a northern prison into Canada and made it to Montreal where he hooked up with other rebels well known to be there and got involved in a plot to burn NYC hotels during the election of 1864: "The Man Who Tried To Burn New York" (1990), by Nat Brandt (https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Tried-Burn-York/dp/0425119181/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=Robert+Cobb+Kennedy&qid=1564432019&s=gateway&sr=8-7). Similar operators led to the attack on a town in northern New Hampshire near the Canadian border in 1864 to rob a bank, which was largely successful!

u/Sherman88 · 3 pointsr/USCivilWar

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

u/obstacle2 · 3 pointsr/USCivilWar

I have a few suggestions.

One is a book of short stories written by a journalist and veteran of the civil war, Ambrose Bierce. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Stories-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486280381 It's an excellent piece of fiction and some of the most gripping stories about the war I've ever read. The short stories in this collection draw on ideas about families on opposite ends of the battlefield and what it was like to fight in your own homeland, as well as others.

The second is titled Civil War Hospital Sketches and is written by a volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Hospital-Sketches-Louisa-Alcott/dp/0486449009 It is a short book that contains some of her experiences as a nurse during the war.

The book The Union War by Gary Gallagher set out to explain why the North felt so compelled to fight a war. It draws on primary sources like regimental yearbooks and personal letters to understand the motivation of fighting men of the time. The gist of it is, people believed in the idea that American democracy was an exceptional experiment and if the country was allowed to tear itself in two, the experiment and democracy would be a failure. http://www.amazon.com/Union-War-Gary-W-Gallagher/dp/0674066081/

The Confederate Home Guard is an interesting concept I haven't seen represented in anything except the film Cold Mountain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Home_Guard Essentially militias made up of the men who did not/were not able to serve in the Confederate army. The had a significant amount of authority over the civilian population and sometimes dealt harshly with deserters they came across. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Home_Guard

On the Union side, Contraband was the term applied to the newly freed slaves who were either employed by the Union army or who followed the Union army in hope of some kind of assistance. The often set up camps around Union forts and once the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, the families of black soldiers were often located there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraband_(American_Civil_War)

u/michaelscape · 1 pointr/USCivilWar

Here's a whole book of essays by Southerner's boldly defending slavery as the cause for secession and war. It takes different angles (slavery is christian, slavery is the mudsill of democracy, slavery is genetically correct, etc etc):

https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Slavery-Proslavery-Thought-Documents/dp/0312133278

​

u/winowmak3r · 6 pointsr/USCivilWar

>1) Why do you like this war in particular?

It's the single most defining moment in US history besides the revolution itself, imo. We still feel the repercussions of what happened to this day. The Civil War made what America is today, for better or for worse.

>2) Which side do root for?

I grew up north of the Mason Dixon line so if I had a side I was "rooting" for it'd be the Union. But the war is so much more than that.

>3) Why is seceding considered a betrayal or at least unpatriotic?

The rebels of any rebellion are often labeled as the traitors. The Founding Fathers were traitors. I wouldn't say the South was unpatriotic though. They were patriotic in their own way, for their own country. The South didn't secede because it wanted to destroy the country, they seceded because they thought the differences between North and South were irreconcilable. There's so much more on this topic I could write about.

>4) What are some interesting factoids or misconceptions about the Civil war?

Something like ~1/3 of the soldiers of the war, on both sides, were immigrants.

The war in the West was probably more influential about bringing an end to the war than most people realize. It's a shame it's not talked about nearly as much as the war in the East.

>5) What is your fav civil war movie?

Gettysburg, hands down. It's based off the book The Killer Angels. It really is a good work of historical fiction. I picked it for my "sustained silent reading" book in grade school read that one copy so much I wore the pages tissue paper thin.