For over four decades, Richard Buswell has trained his camera on the landscape of Montana, with its abandoned and overgrown homesteads and majestic, never-ending skies. In the recent work assembled in this volume, Buswell’s fourth book, his subjects are much more than scattered remains. His black-and-white photographs frame cast-off, common things to reveal abstract patterns in the tradition of twentieth-century modernist photography. As Buswell puts it, his work is “more interpretive and abstract than it is documentary. The images explore the junction where decaying artifacts become visual echoes of the past.” To create a portfolio of images that make us look anew at the West requires a mix of courage and patience, of persistence and imagination. Richard Buswell has shown just these qualities as he has turned a youthful hobby into a powerful means for exploring the past and present of his Montana homeland.

In The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (1970) and The Confederate Nation (1979), Emory Thomas redefined the field of Civil War history and reconceptualized the Confederacy as a unique entity fighting a war for survival. Inside the Confederate Nation honors his enormous contributions to the field with fresh interpretations of all aspects of Confederate life -- nationalism and identity, family and gender, battlefront and home front, race, and postwar legacies and memories. Many of the volume's twenty essays focus on individuals, households, communities, and particular regions of the South, highlighting the sheer variety of circumstances southerners faced over the course of the war. Other chapters explore the public and private dilemmas faced by diplomats, policy makers, journalists, and soldiers within the new nation. All of the essays attempt to explain the place of southerners within the Confederacy, how they came to see themselves and others differently because of secession, and the disparities between their expectations and reality.

Includes annual reports of the institution.