The Long Civil War

The nine years between South Carolina's secession in 1860 and the election of Ulysses S. Grant as president in 1868 signified a watershed in American history. One historian explains correctly that it took almost nine decades to eradicate slavery, and its horrible legacies endure, painfully alive today. The "Long Civil War" remains, according to another scholar, "an unfinished process," and "The Undead War." Contemporary historians and literary scholars continually expand the geographic, temporal, and thematic dimensions of the Civil War era, what an earlier generation of scholars termed the "Middle Period" of American History. No longer do they limit the Civil War's meaning and range of impact to the antebellum decades, or from 1861 to 1865, or define the so-called Reconstruction period as covering the dozen years from 1865 to 1877.  

In The Long Civil War, editors John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault bring together ten essays that contribute to and build upon this emerging and expanding new scholarship. With a collection of leading voices, the essays examine race, reform, the Civil War home front, disabled veterans, suicide, military modernization, World War I, historical memory, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Walt Disney's films. Expanding the contours of the Civil War's reach, the collected scholars seek to add new frameworks for assessing continuity and change and identifying similarities and differences between regions, peoples, and ideas. Together, they chart the variety of uses of the Civil War in contemporary culture while broadening the meaning of America's bloodiest war. Bringing together new and established scholars, The Long Civil War will be of interest to Civil War historians and enthusiasts alike.