Provides a broad overview with particular emphasis placed on how the topic affects and is affected by, political, economic, and social change in American and global society.

One hundred and fifty years after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still captivates the American imagination, and its reverberations continue to be felt throughout the nation's social and political landscape. Louis P. Masur's The Civil War: A Concise History is a masterful and eminently readable overview of the war's multiple causes and catastrophic effects.

American Civil Wars takes readers beyond the battlefields and sectional divides of the U.S. Civil War to view the conflict from outside the national arena of the United States. Contributors position the American conflict squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings--all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s.

In the long and bitter prelude to war, southern transplants dominated California government, keeping the state aligned with Dixie. However, a murderous duel in 1859 killed "Free Soil" U.S. Senator David C. Broderick, and public opinion began to change. As war broke out back east, a golden-tongued preacher named Reverend Thomas Starr King crisscrossed the state endeavoring to save the Golden State for the Union. Seventeen thousand California volunteers thwarted secessionist schemes and waged brutal campaigns against native tribesmen resisting white encroachment as far away as Idaho and New Mexico. And a determined battalion of California cavalry journeyed to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to battle John Singleton Mosby, the South's deadliest partisan ranger. Author Richard Hurley delves into homefront activities during the nation's bloodiest war and chronicles the adventures of the brave men who fought far from home.

Call it the Vietnam Syndrome or Black Hawk Down blowback. It's the standard assumption that Americans won't tolerate combat casualties, that a rising body count lowers support for war. But that's not true, argues historian Steven Casey; even worse, this assumption damages democracy. Fearing a backlash, the military has routinely distorted its casualty reports in order to hide the true cost of war. When Soldiers Fall takes a new look at the way Americans have dealt with the toll of armed conflict.

What happens to members of the United States Armed Forces after they die? Why do soldiers endanger their lives to recover the remains of their comrades? Why does the military spend enormous resources and risk further fatalities to recover the bodies of the fallen, even decades after the cessation of hostilities? Soldier Dead is the first book to fully address the complicated physical, social, religious, economic, and political issues concerning the remains of men and women who die while serving their country.

A senior military historian presents an unflinching account of the human costs of the Civil War. Many Americans tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, or advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment.

This book is an examination of American war and military operations casualty lists and statistics. It provides tables, compiled by sources at the Department of Defense (DOD), indicating the number of fatalities and numbers of wounded among American military personnel serving in principal wars and combat actions from the Revolutionary War to the current Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, as well as operations in Afghanistan and related conflicts.