Catoosa County's rich history touches upon many of the defining events and social changes of America's past. As settlers expanded westward, Georgia forcibly removed Native Americans from the boundaries of what would eventually form Catoosa, a Cherokee name that the settlers adopted as their own. As the site of the second most costly battle in the Civil War, Chickamauga set the stage for much that followed in Catoosa's history, from the end of a three-thousand-year-old mode of warfare to the beginnings of women's service in the military. Though nearly one million people visit Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park each year seeking to understand and connect to the Civil War struggle, many remain unaware of the larger part Catoosa played in the unfolding drama of America. Join local historian Jeff O'Bryant as he brings this valuable heritage to light.

Although hundreds of thousands of people died fighting in the American Civil War, perhaps the war's biggest casualty was the nation's legal order. A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction explores the implications of this major change by bringing legal history into dialogue with the scholarship of other historical fields. Federal policy on slavery and race, particularly the three Reconstruction amendments, are the best-known legal innovations of the era. Change, however, permeated all levels of the legal system, altering Americans' relationship to the law and allowing them to move popular conceptions of justice into the ambit of government policy. The results linked Americans to the nation through individual rights, which were extended to more people and, as a result of new claims, were reimagined to cover a wider array of issues. But rights had limits in what they could accomplish, particularly when it came to the collective goals that so many ordinary Americans advocated.