'From the first shot fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, to the last shot fired at Appomattox, food played a crucial role in the Civil War. In Starving the South, culinary historian Andrew Smith takes a fascinating gastronomical look at the war and its aftermath. At the time, the North mobilized its agricultural resources, fed its civilians and military, and still had massive amounts of food to export to Europe. The South did not; while people starved, the morale of their soldiers waned and desertions from the Army of the Confederacy increased.....' (Book Jacket)

Diana Wylie is Associate Professor of History at Boston University, and the author of A Little God: The Twilight of Patriarchy in a Southern African Chiefdom.

The little-known history of anti-secession Southerners: “Absolutely essential Civil War reading.” —Booklist, starred review Bitterly Divided reveals that the South was in fact fighting two civil wars—the external one that we know so much about, and an internal one about which there is scant literature and virtually no public awareness. In this fascinating look at a hidden side of the South’s history, David Williams shows the powerful and little-understood impact of the thousands of draft resisters, Southern Unionists, fugitive slaves, and other Southerners who opposed the Confederate cause. “This fast-paced book will be a revelation even to professional historians. . . . His astonishing story details the deep, often murderous divisions in Southern society. Southerners took up arms against each other, engaged in massacres, guerrilla warfare, vigilante justice and lynchings, and deserted in droves from the Confederate army . . . Some counties and regions even seceded from the secessionists . . . With this book, the history of the Civil War will never be the same again.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Most Southerners looked on the conflict with the North as ‘a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,’ especially because owners of 20 or more slaves and all planters and public officials were exempt from military service . . . The Confederacy lost, it seems, because it was precisely the kind of house divided against itself that Lincoln famously said could not stand.” —Booklist, starred review

Originally published in 1969, the documentary evidence of poverty and malnutrition in the American South showcased in Still Hungry in America still resonates today. The work was created to complement a July 1967 U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty hearings on hunger in America. At those hearings, witnesses documented examples of deprivation afflicting hundreds of thousands of American families. The most powerful testimonies came from the authors of this profoundly disturbing and important book. Al Clayton’s sensitive camerawork enabled the subcommittee members to see the agonizing results of insufficient food and improper diet, rendered graphically in stunted, weakened and fractured bones, dry, shrunken, and ulcerated skin, wasting muscles, and bloated legs and abdomens. Physician and child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who had worked with these populations for many years, described with fierce clarity the medical and psychological effects of hunger. Coles’s powerful narrative, reinforced by heartbreaking interviews with impoverished people and accompanied by 101 photographs taken by Clayton in Appalachia, rural Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia, convey the plight of the millions of hungry citizens in the most affluent nation on earth. A new foreword by historian Thomas J. Ward Jr. analyzes food insecurity among today’s rural and urban poor and frames the current crisis in the American diet not as a scarcity of food but as an overabundance of empty calories leading to obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Darling, I never wanted to gow home as bad in my life as I doo now and if they don’t give mee a furlow I am going any how. Written in December 1862 by Private Wright Vinson in Tennessee to his wife, Christiana, in Georgia, these lines go to the heart of why Scott Walker wrote this history of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Infantry, a unit of the famed Mercer’s Brigade. All but a few members of the Fifty-seventh lived within a close radius of eighty miles from each other. More than just an account of their military engagements, this is a collective biography of a close-knit group. Relatives and neighbors served and died side by side in the Fifty-seventh, and Walker excels at showing how family ties, friendships, and other intimate dynamics played out in wartime settings. Humane but not sentimental, the history abounds in episodes of real feeling: a starving soldier’s theft of a pie; another’s open confession, in a letter to his wife, that he may desert; a slave’s travails as a camp orderly. Drawing on memoirs and a trove of unpublished letters and diaries, Walker follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more. Hardened fighters who would wish hell on an incompetent superior but break down at the sight of a dying Yankee, these are real people, as rarely seen in other Civil War histories.

In 1991 the Kennedy brothers published The South War Right!, launching the modern movement of Southern awareness and activism. Their work has since sold 180,000 copies. In their new, 3rd edition for a 21st century audience, the Kennedys have updated their message to provide guidance for the harsh conditions against the liberty and even survival of the South that face us in this time. If you love the South, you need this book!

What would separate Union and Confederate countries look like if the South had won the Civil War? In fact, this was something that southern secessionists actively debated. Imagining themselves as nation builders, they understood the importance of a plan for the economic structure of the Confederacy. The traditional view assumes that Confederate slave-based agrarianism went hand in hand with a natural hostility toward industry and commerce. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, John Majewski's analysis finds that secessionists strongly believed in industrial development and state-led modernization. They blamed the South's lack of development on Union policies of discriminatory taxes on southern commerce and unfair subsidies for northern industry. Majewski argues that Confederates' opposition to a strong central government was politically tied to their struggle against northern legislative dominance. Once the Confederacy was formed, those who had advocated states' rights in the national legislature in order to defend against northern political dominance quickly came to support centralized power and a strong executive for war making and nation building.