Sutherland, Jonathan

Summary: The North and South sections of the United States developed along very different lines. The South s economy remained predominantly agricultural, while the North s evolved as a powerhouse of industry. Over time, different social cultures, attitudes, economics, and politics developed, resulting in simmering tensions. However, the final catalyst for conflict, ultimately leading to war, was over...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Mason Crest 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

Waugh, John C.

Summary: How did Abraham Lincoln, long held as a paragon of presidential bravery and principled politics, find his way to the White House? How did he become this one man great enough to risk the fate of the nation on the well-worn but cast-off notion that all men are created equal? John C. Waugh takes us on Lincoln's road to the Civil War.

Format: sound recording-nonmusical

Publisher / Publication Date: Blackstone Audiobooks 2007

Copies Available at Woodmere

Fleming, Thomas J.

Summary: Explores the possibility that the Civil War started not because of slavery, but because the South was chosen to house the nation's leadership instead of northern New England where the Revolution had begun.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Da Capo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group 2013

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Richards, Leonard L.

Summary: It has always been understood that the 1848 discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada influenced the battle over the admission of California to the Union. Now, historian Richards makes clear the links between the Gold Rush and many of the regional crises in the lead-up to the Civil War. Richards explains how Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves, only to be frustrated by...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Alfred A. Knopf 2007

Copies Available at Interlochen

Jakes, John

Summary: A novel of two families during twenty turbulent, troubled years that culminate in the shattering Civil War.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1982

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Kaplan, Fred

Summary: Explores how the differing experiences and viewpoints of two Presidents shaped slavery and race relations in America for more than a century.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2017

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Ayers, Edward L.

Summary: "In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a landmark work of stirring historical narrative and deep scholarship. It gives us the Civil War on an intimate scale, as a story of individuals and families, civilians and soldiers, slaves, free blacks and whites, women and men. It upends what has become the standard view of the Civil War. By taking a ground-level view of the war, Edward L. Ayers shows that...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: W.W. Norton 2003

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Adams, Charles

Summary: Adams uses documents from foreign (primarily British) and domestic observers to state that the South was exercising the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence against a fiscally-quarrelsome and commercial North, rather than maintaining lofty moral principles of slavery.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2000

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Goldfield, David R.

Summary: In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom." Where past scholars have limned the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere. As the Second Great...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Bloomsbury Press 2011

Copies Available at Fife Lake

Bordewich, Fergus M.

Summary: Chronicles the 1850s appeals of Western territories to join the Union as slave or free states, profiling period balances in the Senate, Henry Clay's attempts at compromise, and the border crisis between New Mexico and Texas.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Simon & Schuster 2012

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Oates, Stephen B.

Contents: The speakers : Thomas Jefferson -- Henry Clay -- Nat Turner -- William Lloyd Garrison -- John C. Calhoun -- Frederick Douglass -- Harriet Beecher Stowe -- George Fitzhugh -- Stephen A. Douglas -- Abraham Lincoln -- John Brown -- Jefferson Davis -- Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

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Brands, H. W.

Summary: "What do moral people do when democracy countenances evil? The question, implicit in the idea that people can govern themselves, came to a head in America at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the struggle over slavery. John Brown's answer was violence--violence of a sort some in later generations would call terrorism. Brown was a deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Doubleday 2020

Copies Available at Fife Lake

Peacock, Judith

Summary: Discusses the series of events that lead to the secession of the southern states from the Union and to the start of the Civil War in 1861.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Bridgestone Books 2003

Copies Available at Peninsula

David, Alex

Contents: The early life of Abraham Lincoln -- The Civil War -- The ceremony at the Soldiers' National Cemetery -- The speech -- An enduring document -- Primary source transcription -- Chronology -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Further reading.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: 2021

Copies Available at Interlochen

Cooper, William J. (William James)

Summary: Presents a revisionist account of the period between Lincoln's election and the firing on Fort Sumter, evaluating the contributions of key figures and the circumstances that contributed to the Civil War's inevitability.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Alfred A. Knopf 2012

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Barney, William L

Summary: "Rebels in the Making narrates and interprets secession in the fifteen slave states in 1860-1861. It is a political history informed by the socio-economic structures of the South and the varying forms they took across the region. It explains how a small minority of Southern radicals exploited the hopes and fears of Southern whites over slavery after Lincoln's election in November of 1860 to...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Oxford University Press 2020

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Davis, William C.

Summary: Discusses the events leading to the civil war, from the South Carolina secession convention to the fighting at Fort Sumter.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Time-Life Books 1983

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Baumgartner, Alice

Summary: "The Underground Railroad to the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War. But during the same decades, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border intoMexico. In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Basic Books 2020

Copies Available at Woodmere

Brandt, Nat.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Syracuse University Press 1990

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Goodheart, Adam.

Summary: As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, historian Adam Goodheart presents an original account of how the Civil War began. 1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second american revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents' faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Alfred A. Knopf 2011

Copies Available at Woodmere

Catton, Bruce

Summary: Chronicles the history of the American Civil War, starting with the Democratic Party's Charleston Convention in 1860, and ending with first battle of the war at Bull Run.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Phoenix Press 1961

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Shepard, Ray Anthony

Summary: Here is the riveting dual biography of two little-known but extraordinary men in Civil War history George E. Stephens and James Henry Gooding. These Union soldiers not only served in the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, the well-known black regiment, but were also war correspondents who published eyewitness reports of the battlefields. Their dispatches told the truth of their lives at camp, their...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Calkins Creek, An Imprint of Highlights 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

Raines, Howell

Summary: "A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist reveals the little-known story of the Union soldiers from Alabama who played a decisive role in the Civil War, and how they were scrubbed from the history books. We all know how the Civil War was won: by courageous Yankees who triumphed over the South. But as veteran journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only soldiers from Northern states who helped...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Crown 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere