In the wake of America's Civil War, hundreds of thousands of men who fought for the Confederacy trudged back to their homes in the Southland. Some -- due to lingering effects from war wounds, other disabilities, or the horrors of combat -- were unable to care for themselves. Homeless, disabled, and destitute veterans began appearing on the sidewalks of southern cities and towns. In 1902 Kentucky's Confederate veterans organized and built the Kentucky Confederate Home, a luxurious refuge in Pewee Valley for their unfortunate comrades. Until it closed in 1934, the Home was a respectable -- if not always idyllic -- place where disabled and impoverished veterans could spend their last days in comfort and free from want. In My Old Confederate Home: A Respectable Place for Civil War Veterans, Rusty Williams frames the lively history of the Kentucky Confederate Home with the stories of those who built, supported, and managed it: a daring cavalryman-turned-bank-robber, a senile ship captain, a prosperous former madam, and a small-town clergyman whose concern for the veterans cost him his pastorate. Each chapter is peppered with the poignant stories of men who spent their final years as voluntary wards of an institution that required residents to live in a manner which reinforced the mythology of a noble Johnny Reb and a tragic Lost Cause. Based on thorough research utilizing a range of valuable resources, including the Kentucky Confederate Home's operational documents, contemporary accounts, unpublished letters, and family stories, My Old Confederate Home reveals the final, untold chapter of Kentucky's Civil War history.

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy’s story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home." So begins an American standard, first published as a minstrel song, that became dear to the hearts of millions and ultimately was enshrined as the Kentucky Derby's sonic centerpiece—a popular selling point for Kentucky tourism. Emily Bingham's masterful decoding of Stephen Foster's 1853 ballad reveals that the song was always about slavery and how white Americans wanted to remember it. Acknowledging her own entanglement in this legacy, Bingham takes readers on the journey of a melody, from its inception by a white northerner, to its enormous success on the blackface circuit, in recordings by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and on the pages of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to its countless screen appearances, including Shirley Temple movies, The Simpsons, and Mad Men. For almost two centuries, "My Old Kentucky Home" has never been just a song—it continues to be a resonant, changing emblem of America's original sin, whose blood-drenched shadow haunts us still. My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song investigates the tune's hidden history, lodged in the nation's cultural DNA, and ends with a startling solution for what to do with this artifact of race and slavery.

In the wake of America's Civil War, hundreds of thousands of men who fought for the Confederacy trudged back to their homes in the Southland. Some—due to lingering effects from war wounds, other disabilities, or the horrors of combat—were unable to care for themselves. Homeless, disabled, and destitute veterans began appearing on the sidewalks of southern cities and towns. In 1902 Kentucky's Confederate veterans organized and built the Kentucky Confederate Home, a luxurious refuge in Pewee Valley for their unfortunate comrades. Until it closed in 1934, the Home was a respectable— if not always idyllic—place where disabled and impoverished veterans could spend their last days in comfort and free from want. In My Old Confederate Home: A Respectable Place for Civil War Veterans, Rusty Williams frames the lively history of the Kentucky Confederate Home with the stories of those who built, supported, and managed it: a daring cavalryman-turned-bank-robber, a senile ship captain, a prosperous former madam, and a small-town clergyman whose concern for the veterans cost him his pastorate. Each chapter is peppered with the poignant stories of men who spent their final years as voluntary wards of an institution that required residents to live in a manner which reinforced the mythology of a noble Johnny Reb and a tragic Lost Cause. Based on thorough research utilizing a range of valuable resources, including the Kentucky Confederate Home's operational documents, contemporary accounts, unpublished letters, and family stories, My Old Confederate Home reveals the final, untold chapter of Kentucky's Civil War history.

Wall Street Journal’s Five Best Books on the Confederates’ Lost Cause Southern Association for Women Historians Julia Cherry Spruill Prize Even without the right to vote, members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy proved to have enormous social and political influence throughout the South—all in the name of preserving Confederate culture. Karen Cox traces the history of the UDC, an organization founded in 1894 to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause. In this edition, with a new preface, Cox acknowledges the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, showing why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure. The Daughters, as UDC members were popularly known, were daughters of the Confederate generation. While southern women had long been leaders in efforts to memorialize the Confederacy, UDC members made the Lost Cause a movement about vindication as well as memorialization. They erected monuments, monitored history for "truthfulness," and sought to educate coming generations of white southerners about an idyllic past and a just cause—states' rights. Soldiers' and widows' homes, perpetuation of the mythology of the antebellum South, and pro-southern textbooks in the region's white public schools were all integral to their mission of creating the New South in the image of the Old. UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, in which states' rights and white supremacy remained intact. To the extent they were successful, the Daughters helped to preserve and perpetuate an agenda for the New South that included maintaining the social status quo. Placing the organization's activities in the context of the postwar and Progressive-Era South, Cox describes in detail the UDC's origins and early development, its efforts to collect and preserve manuscripts and artifacts and to build monuments, and its later role in the peace movement and World War I. This remarkable history of the organization presents a portrait of two generations of southern women whose efforts helped shape the social and political culture of the New South. It also offers a new historical perspective on the subject of Confederate memory and the role southern women played in its development.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award “McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.” —Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic “McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.” —Eric Foner, The Nation “Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy’s ‘undoing,’ she has in fact accomplished exactly that.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic “A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.” —Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.

In Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne E. Marshall traces the development of a Confederate identity in Kentucky between 1865 and 1925, belying the fact that Kentucky never left the Union. After the Civil War, the people of Kentucky appeared to forget their Union loyalties and embraced the Democratic politics, racial violence, and Jim Crow laws associated with former Confederate states. Marshall looks beyond postwar political and economic factors to the longer-term commemorations of the Civil War by which Kentuckians fixed the state's remembrance of the conflict for the following sixty years.