Michael Fellman – författare

During the Civil War, the state of Missouri witnessed the most widespread, prolonged, and destructive guerrilla fighting in American history. With its horrific combination of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and swift and bloody raids on farms and settlements, the conflict approached total war, engulfing the whole populace and challenging any notion of civility. Michael Fellman's Inside War captures the conflict from "inside," drawing on a wealth of first-hand evidence, including letters, diaries, military reports, court-martial transcripts, depositions, and newspaper accounts. He gives us a clear picture of the ideological, social, and economic forces that divided the people and launched the conflict. Along with depicting how both Confederate and Union officials used the guerrilla fighters and their tactics to their own advantage, Fellman describes how ordinary civilian men and women struggled to survive amidst the random terror perpetuated by both sides; what drove the combatants themselves to commit atrocities and vicious acts of vengeance; and how the legend of Jesse James arose from this brutal episode in the American Civil War.

Integrates the political, social, military, and economic forces of the Civil War

Absorbing and accessible, This Terrible War : The Civil War and Its Aftermath deals with the American Civil War in a realistic and unromantic light, discussing the hard experiences of ordinary people and the uncertain decisions of military and political leaders. The title explores both the years leading up to the Civil War, and the war's aftermath in the North and the South. The discussion extends to 1896, reframing the period of the Civil War.

NOTE: This is the standalone book.

It was Willaim Tecumseh Sherman who both articulated and practiced the relentless scorched-earth policy that broke the heart of the Confederacy. This work illuminates the emotional as well as the intellectual, ideological and occupational lives of this Victorian American.

In Lincoln’s Generals , Gabor S. Boritt and a team of distinguished historians examine the interaction between Abraham Lincoln and his five key Civil War generals: McClellan, Hooker, Meade, Sherman, and Grant, providing fresh insight into this mixed bag of officers and the president’s tireless efforts to work with them. The president’s relationship with his generals was never easy. Stephen W. Sears underscores McClellan’s perverse obstinacy as Lincoln tried to drive him ahead. Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark E. Neely Jr. sheds new light on the president’s relationship with Hooker, arguing that he was wrong to push the general to attack at Chancellorsville. Boritt writes about Lincoln’s prickly relationship with the victor of Gettysburg, “old snapping turtle” George Meade. Michael Fellman reveals the political stress between the White House and Sherman, a staunch conservative who did not want blacks in his army but who was crucial to the war effort. And John Y. Simon looks past the legendary camaraderie between Lincoln and Grant to reveal the tensions in their relationship. These authors take us inside the personalities and relationships that shaped the course of the nation’s most costly war.

Historical observations of abolition have ranged from perspectives of contempt to acclamation, and now show signs of a major change in interpretation. The literature often has been dominated by hostile appraisals of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionist leaders until the 1960s, when historians equated abolitionism may have fluctuated from one period to the next, most of this scholarship shared certain assumptions-that abolitionists provided pivotal factors toward the onset of the Civil War, that their internal disputes were intensely interesting, and that somehow they were emblematic of other generations of radicals in the American experience. Today the scope of antislavery scholarship was widened to examine abolition in light of the social, economic, and political climate of nineteenth-century society and culture. Thus volume of fourteen new and original essays comprises the first survey of current directions in abolitionist writings and represents an advanced perspective in contemporary American historical research. The contributors include such well-known scholars on abolitionism as Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Leonard Richards, James Brewer Stewart, and William Wiecek. The authors examine various dimensions of abolitionism from its religious context to its international effect, from its attitude toward the northern poor to its impact on feminism, and from wars of words waged with southern intellectuals to the bloodier conflicts begun in Kansas. These essays, rather than expounding a single revisionist attitude, include every major approach to antislavery - women's history, quantitative history, comparative history, legal history, black history, psychohistory, social history. Antislavery Reconsidered allows both specialists and laymen a chance to survey recent scholastic trends in this area and provides for them the assumptions, methods, and conclusions of the best current literature on antislavery.

Seeking the key to good living through physical well-being, the American public since at least the 1830s has devoured literature proffering medical advice. Making Sense of Self is an historical analysis of the ideological content of a broad sample of late nineteenth-century popular advice literature concerning the body and the mind. At a time when the middle class was threatened with tumultuous social and economic change, such publications offered blueprints for self-regulation, teaching survival and discipline, and bringing some sense of order and hope for self-improvement.Anita and Michael Fellman analyze this literature as a signpost to the general aspirations, anxieties, debates, and assumptions of late Victorian Americans, who were less optimistic than had been their antebellum forebears about personal and social progress. In particular, the authors interpret the ideas these various advisors offered regarding bodily health, the workings of brain and mind, sexuality, and the will. Although the advice literature as a whole was diverse and even contradictory, the ethic of moderation was often stressed as the method, however limited, to obtain some sense of discipline and control, and the will was frequently asserted as the means to a more dynamic self-expression.The sense of fragility, search for security, and dependence on individual self­-governance revealed in this literature remain as persistent elements in the middle-class American character. The significance of this popular ideology lies not in whether it led to specific behavior, but in how it enabled people to interpret themselves and their situation to themselves during a period in which many basic ideological issues appeared more confused than certain. Making Sense of Self offers a close examination of a period analogous to our own times.