In Disunion, Edward L. Widmer, George Kalogerakis, and Clay Risen bring together the best essays of the celebrated New York Times blog to offer a unique and unforgettable history of The Civil War, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. Celebrated upon publication for their startling originality, their uncanny ability to bring immediacy and to inspire fresh thought, the pieces were an integral part of the sesquicentennial celebrations, and indeed came to define them. Susan Schulten's "Visualizing History " offers but one example. In 1860, the United States government took its final count of the country's slave population. When the Coast Survey produced maps from the data, Americans could at last visualize slavery's prevalence; degrees of shading indicated the number of slaves in a given county. Beaufort County was one of the darkest on the map-in this blackened zone of South Carolina, slaves comprised 82.8 percent of the populace. Lincoln became obsessed with the map and used it to trace his troops' movement-Francis Bicknell Carpenter even painted it in the corner of "President Lincoln Reading the Emancipation Proclamation to His Cabinet.Schulten's pieces and scores of others explore the Civil War by means of key contemporary sources. Moving both chronologically and thematically across all four years, the volume is a comprehensive and illuminating text for scholars and general readers alike. Major academic and popular voices come together in each chapter to discuss secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. The selections feature previously unheard voices-women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-but also Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. In one volume, Disunion explores America's bloodiest conflict and brings home its legacies.

Between 2011 and 2015, the Opinion section of The New York Times published Disunion, a series marking the long string of anniversaries around the Civil War, the most destructive, and most defining, conflict in American history. The works were startling in their range and direction, some taking on major topics, like the Gettysburg Address and the Battle of Fredericksburg, while others tackled subjects whose seemingly incidental quality yielded unexpected riches and new angles. Some come from the country''s leading historians; others from those for whom the war figured in private ways, involving an ancestor or a letter found in a trunk. Disunion received wide acclaim for featuring some of the most original thinking about the Civil War in years. For millions of readers, Disunion came to define the Civil War sesquicentennial.Now the historian Ted Widmer, along with Clay Risen and George Kalogerakis of The New York Times, has curated a collection of these pieces, covering the entire history of the Civil War, from Lincoln''s election to Appomattox and beyond. Moving chronologically and thematically across all four years of hostilities, this comprehensive and engrossing work examines secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. Here are previously unheard voices-of women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-alongside those of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee, portrayed in human as well as historical scale. David Blight sheds light on how Frederick Douglass welcomed South Carolina''s secession-an event he knew would catapult the abolitionist movement into the spotlight; Elizabeth R. Varon explores how both North and South clamored to assert that the nation''s “ladies,” symbolic of moral purity, had sided with them; Harold Holzer deciphers Lincoln''s official silence between his election to the presidency and his inauguration-what his supporters named “masterful inactivity”-and the effects it had on the splintering country. More than any single volume ever published, Disunion reveals the full spectrum of America''s bloodiest conflict and illuminates its living legacies.

Between 2011 and 2015, the Opinion section of The New York Times published Disunion, a series marking the long string of anniversaries around the Civil War, the most destructive, and most defining, conflict in American history. The works were startling in their range and direction, some taking on major topics, like the Gettysburg Address and the Battle of Fredericksburg, while others tackled subjects whose seemingly incidental quality yielded unexpected riches and new angles. Some come from the country''s leading historians; others from those for whom the war figured in private ways, involving an ancestor or a letter found in a trunk. Disunion received wide acclaim for featuring some of the most original thinking about the Civil War in years. For millions of readers, Disunion came to define the Civil War sesquicentennial.Now the historian Ted Widmer, along with Clay Risen and George Kalogerakis of The New York Times, has curated a collection of these pieces, covering the entire history of the Civil War, from Lincoln''s election to Appomattox and beyond. Moving chronologically and thematically across all four years of hostilities, this comprehensive and engrossing work examines secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. Here are previously unheard voices-of women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-alongside those of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee, portrayed in human as well as historical scale. David Blight sheds light on how Frederick Douglass welcomed South Carolina''s secession-an event he knew would catapult the abolitionist movement into the spotlight; Elizabeth R. Varon explores how both North and South clamored to assert that the nation''s “ladies,” symbolic of moral purity, had sided with them; Harold Holzer deciphers Lincoln''s official silence between his election to the presidency and his inauguration-what his supporters named “masterful inactivity”-and the effects it had on the splintering country. More than any single volume ever published, Disunion reveals the full spectrum of America''s bloodiest conflict and illuminates its living legacies.

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

In Disunion, Edward L. Widmer, George Kalogerakis, and Clay Risen bring together the best essays of the celebrated New York Times blog to offer a unique and unforgettable history of The Civil War, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. Celebrated upon publication for their startling originality, their uncanny ability to bring immediacy and to inspire fresh thought, the pieces were an integral part of the sesquicentennial celebrations, and indeed came to define them. Susan Schulten's "Visualizing History " offers but one example. In 1860, the United States government took its final count of the country's slave population. When the Coast Survey produced maps from the data, Americans could at last visualize slavery's prevalence; degrees of shading indicated the number of slaves in a given county. Beaufort County was one of the darkest on the map-in this blackened zone of South Carolina, slaves comprised 82.8 percent of the populace. Lincoln became obsessed with the map and used it to trace his troops' movement-Francis Bicknell Carpenter even painted it in the corner of "President Lincoln Reading the Emancipation Proclamation to His Cabinet.Schulten's pieces and scores of others explore the Civil War by means of key contemporary sources. Moving both chronologically and thematically across all four years, the volume is a comprehensive and illuminating text for scholars and general readers alike. Major academic and popular voices come together in each chapter to discuss secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. The selections feature previously unheard voices-women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-but also Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. In one volume, Disunion explores America's bloodiest conflict and brings home its legacies.

Between 2011 and 2015, the Opinion section of The New York Times published Disunion, a series marking the long string of anniversaries around the Civil War, the most destructive, and most defining, conflict in American history. The works were startling in their range and direction, some taking on major topics, like the Gettysburg Address and the Battle of Fredericksburg, while others tackled subjects whose seemingly incidental quality yielded unexpected riches and new angles. Some come from the country''s leading historians; others from those for whom the war figured in private ways, involving an ancestor or a letter found in a trunk. Disunion received wide acclaim for featuring some of the most original thinking about the Civil War in years. For millions of readers, Disunion came to define the Civil War sesquicentennial.Now the historian Ted Widmer, along with Clay Risen and George Kalogerakis of The New York Times, has curated a collection of these pieces, covering the entire history of the Civil War, from Lincoln''s election to Appomattox and beyond. Moving chronologically and thematically across all four years of hostilities, this comprehensive and engrossing work examines secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. Here are previously unheard voices-of women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-alongside those of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee, portrayed in human as well as historical scale. David Blight sheds light on how Frederick Douglass welcomed South Carolina''s secession-an event he knew would catapult the abolitionist movement into the spotlight; Elizabeth R. Varon explores how both North and South clamored to assert that the nation''s “ladies,” symbolic of moral purity, had sided with them; Harold Holzer deciphers Lincoln''s official silence between his election to the presidency and his inauguration-what his supporters named “masterful inactivity”-and the effects it had on the splintering country. More than any single volume ever published, Disunion reveals the full spectrum of America''s bloodiest conflict and illuminates its living legacies.

Between 2011 and 2015, the Opinion section of The New York Times published Disunion, a series marking the long string of anniversaries around the Civil War, the most destructive, and most defining, conflict in American history. The works were startling in their range and direction, some taking on major topics, like the Gettysburg Address and the Battle of Fredericksburg, while others tackled subjects whose seemingly incidental quality yielded unexpected riches and new angles. Some come from the country''s leading historians; others from those for whom the war figured in private ways, involving an ancestor or a letter found in a trunk. Disunion received wide acclaim for featuring some of the most original thinking about the Civil War in years. For millions of readers, Disunion came to define the Civil War sesquicentennial.Now the historian Ted Widmer, along with Clay Risen and George Kalogerakis of The New York Times, has curated a collection of these pieces, covering the entire history of the Civil War, from Lincoln''s election to Appomattox and beyond. Moving chronologically and thematically across all four years of hostilities, this comprehensive and engrossing work examines secession, slavery, battles, and domestic and global politics. Here are previously unheard voices-of women, freed African Americans, and Native Americans-alongside those of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee, portrayed in human as well as historical scale. David Blight sheds light on how Frederick Douglass welcomed South Carolina''s secession-an event he knew would catapult the abolitionist movement into the spotlight; Elizabeth R. Varon explores how both North and South clamored to assert that the nation''s “ladies,” symbolic of moral purity, had sided with them; Harold Holzer deciphers Lincoln''s official silence between his election to the presidency and his inauguration-what his supporters named “masterful inactivity”-and the effects it had on the splintering country. More than any single volume ever published, Disunion reveals the full spectrum of America''s bloodiest conflict and illuminates its living legacies.

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.

This study examines the meteoric rise and subsequent disintegration of a vigorous American literary-political movement in the 1840s. Calling itself 'Young America', the group found a mouthpiece in the Democratic Review, a literary magazine funded by the Democratic Party and edited by the brash and charismatic John O'Sullivan. The Review was not only a major voice in American politics, but also sponsored such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and greatly inflenced Herman Melville, before it and Young America faded from the national consciousness after the Mexican-American War.