Lacy Ford is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is the recipient of many awards in American and Southern history including the 1999 NEH Fellowship Award and the Francis B. Simkins prize for his book Origins of Southern Radicalism (1988).

" A recent and welcome addition to the Blackwell Companions to American History series. . . . The choice of Lacy Ford to edit this volume was an excellent one. Ford has assembled a stellar team of scholars . . . Most of the essays are certain to become essential reading for specialists but are also accessible to nonspecialists . . . . [T]his volume belongs on the 'must-read' shelf of scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as those of nineteenth-century southern and U.S. history." Journal of Southern History

• Notes on the contributors viiIntroduction: A Civil War in the Age of Capital 1Lacy K. FordPart I: Sectional Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War1 Slavery and the Union, 1789–1833 25Douglas R. Egerton2 The Market Revolution 41John Larson3 Slavery and the Old South 60Larry Hudson4 Planters, Plain Folk, and Poor Whites in the Old South 75Charles C. Bolton5 Humanitarian Reform and Antislavery 94James B. Stewart6 Women in the Antebellum North 112Teresa Murphy7 Women in the Old South 128Michele Gillespie8 The Road to Secession 152Michael Morrison9 The Republican Triumph 167John Ashworth10 And the War Came 183Daniel CroftsPart II: The Civil War and American Society11 Saving the Union 203Kevin Gannon12 Civil War Military Campaigns: The Union 223Carol Reardon13 Civil War Military Campaigns: The Confederacy 239Steven Woodworth14 The Confederate Home Front 258Mary DeCredico15 Emancipation 277Joseph P. ReidyPart III: Reconstruction and the New Nation16 Defining Reconstruction 299O. Vernon Burton, David Herr, and Matthew Cheney17 The Politics of Reconstruction 323Michael Perman18 The Economics of Reconstruction 342Peter A. Coclanis and Scott Marler19 Southern Labor and Reconstruction 366R. Tracy McKenzie20 Northern Women during the Age of Emancipation 386Nina Silber21 Southern Women during the Age of Emancipation 403Jeannie Whayne22 The Legacy of Confederate Defeat 423Gaines M. Foster23 Reconstruction and the Nation 447Heather RichardsonBibliography 468Index 504