27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Important contribution to Civil War studies., October 20, 2005
This review is from: A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (Hardcover)
I am a 50 year old American who has been teaching college level history classes for over 20 years. The Civil War is not my field of study, but until this book came along, certainly thought I knew the story of my country's greatest conflict.
Not so! "A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom," proved me wrong. Now I have a better understanding of the Civil War as not simply North vs. South, free vs. slave, or Abe vs. Jeff, but rather a series of conflicts all connected by political, social, and economic issues of mid-Nineteenth Century America.
It is a dark history of the Civil War, showing how elites on all sides used the lower classes to further their interests. By the time I was done reading about "Captains of Industry" selling defective muskets; plantation owners producing cotton over food, and elites paying for substitutes to perform their military duty, I wanted to toss Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln into a pit full of hungry badgers!
You may not share my conclusion, or agree with Williams' thesis. His words, however, are backed by considerable research. In most cases, he allows an eyewitness to drive home each point about the many conflicts within this monolith I used to think I understood. Hope you will enjoy this book as I did. Read it, and no matter what your label - Civil War, the War of Yankee Aggression (or the War of Southern Treason) - you will come away with some new ideas on events of 1861-1865.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not your typical history of the Civil War, November 15, 2005
This review is from: A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (Hardcover)
Despite being recounted innumerable times in print, the Civil War is often examined in very narrow terms, usually involving the decisions of commanders and the movement of units on the battlefield. David Williams's book is much different. In chapter-length accounts, Williams looks at the how the war impacted the lives of men and women on the home front, draftees, African Americans and Native Americans - groups often neglected in traditional accounts of the war.
Such a focus brings a refreshing perspective to a well-worn subject. The war depicted in these pages is a much more complex one than in previous books; class tension fuels resentment towards the conflict, while the South struggles to cope with unionist sentiment that is overlooked in many accounts. Though Williams's continual resort to class as the paradigm for evaluating events wears over the course of the book (the "rich man's war" line got a little old after awhile), his conclusions - backed by a solid command of Civil War historiography - are impossible to ignore. The result is a valuable corrective of the standard "guns and generals" account of the Civil War, one that should be required reading for any student of the conflict.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
At last, a general history of this war that doesn't glorify it, February 6, 2006
This review is from: A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (Hardcover)
In the name of full dislosure: I majored in American History (concentrating on Southern History) at the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1975. My father's father's father (my greatgrandfather) died in Confederate military service, leaving my grandfather fatherless.
My mother's father served in a noncombatant role in the first World War (he was married and had a child by that time), and my father (the son of a man whose father died in the Confederate service) served as a First Lieutenant in transport/logistics in the U.S. Army's 8th Air Force during the second of the World War's.
As for me, I graduated from high school in 1970, the last year in which college graduates could gain draft deferments by going to college. So, I avoided serving in Vietnam with the full support of my father.
Of all the books that I have ever read on U.S. and Southern History, there are three that opened my eyes more than another other. And this is one of those three books. The others are:
* "American Colonies: The Settling of North America" by Alan Taylor, a summary and review of modern scholarship on the history of North America until 1810, and
* "Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America" by Lawrence Goodwin, a study of the progressive outbreak among Blacks and whites in rural America at the end of the 19th century.
What's powerful about David Williams book is that it -- like the Taylor book -- summarizes and makes available to general readers a ton of solid scholarship about the Civil War period that has emerged over the last 20-30 years. Its voice is the voice of the majority of the population at that time: small farmers and tradesmen, western settlers, African slaves, free Blacks, new immigrants, war widows, female nurses and spies, small business people, native people who wanted to be left alone as neutral noncombatants.
One of the more powerful things that this book does is to recall some of the verbal histories that people in the South have passed down from generation after generation concerning the war. These are unedited stories, truth that has been passed down without the usual filtering of nationalistic American historians from the North or the "Lost Cause" crowd down home in the South. Wiliams recalls stories from his own family in Georgia, true stories reminiscent of the one that Charles Frazier, author of the novel Cold Mountain, used as a framework around which to build the story of his book and movie about a Confederate deserter in western North Carolina in 1864.
In my family, we have no such stories, probably because my great-grandfather was killed (most likely as a result of a disease caught at the front) during Confederate service and didn't live to tell the tale. For my grandfather and his siblings -- growing up in poverty, with a fourth-grade education and without a father in Nash County, North Carolina, I'm sure that they had little desire to dwell on any war stories, either good or bad.
Fortunately, the great-great grandfther of my friend George from Columbus County, North Carolina DID survive the war, as a Confederate officer. According to the family story, when this Confederate army officer returned from the war he said, essentially, " Well, the war is over. I don't want to think about it any more, and I'm glad it's over."
Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that when my friend George's ancestor returned to Eastern North Carolina from the front, his community was FULL of men who had resisted the Confederate draft and deserted the Confederate armed forces. Even though this gentleman was an officer, he told his family that he felt no ill feelings towards any man who avoided the draft or deserted the Confederate service, because he knew that they all had families to feed and they did what they had to do. (Remember: there was no military housing for families, no G.I. Bill of Rights and no Veterans Administration in those days).
Truth be told, all the horror stories and social trends associated with ANY modern war can be found in David Williams' Peoples History of the Civil War: a rush to war based on misinformation, violent repression of people opposed to war and/or secession, creating incidents in order to manipulate public opionion in favor of war (i.e., Fort Sumter, "Remember the Maine," the Gulf of Tonkin and the fanciful "rescue" of the American medical students in Grenada in 1982 come to mind) resistance to the draft, war profiteering and black marketeering by the politically well-connected, resistance to paying taxes to support the war, mass desertion, suspension of civil liberties, separated families, war refugees, starving women and children, forced labor, torture, abuse and medical neglect of prisoners, women taking on new roles in wartime, dispossession of native people, and finally the usual wartime scenario where rich boys find legal excuses not to fight while poor men are slaughtered at the front.
Yes, sports fans, it's all there, but this time it is presented without all the usual glorification of and rationalizations by generals, politicians and the opportunist crowd that President Eisenhower later called the military/industrial complex. This book is refreshing, because it shows again what pure hell war really is and why it is almost always so horrific for working people anywhere in the world.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
