{"title":"Elizabeth R Varon","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"appomattox-book-elizabeth-r-varon-9780190217860","title":"Appomattox","description":"Winner of the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize of the Austin Civil War Round Table Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the Confederacy Finalist, Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction  Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House evokes a highly gratifying image in the popular mind -- it was, many believe, a moment that transcended politics, a moment of healing, a moment of patriotism untainted by ideology. But as Elizabeth Varon reveals in this vividly narrated history, this rosy image conceals a seething debate over precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of nation would emerge from war. The combatants in that debate included the iconic Lee and Grant, but they also included a cast of characters previously overlooked, who brought their own understanding of the war's causes, consequences, and meaning.   In Appomattox, Varon deftly captures the events swirling around that well remembered-but not well understood-moment when the Civil War ended. She expertly depicts the final battles in Virginia, when Grant's troops surrounded Lee's half-starved army, the meeting of the generals at the McLean House, and the shocked reaction as news of the surrender spread like an electric charge throughout the nation. But as Varon shows, the ink had hardly dried before both sides launched a bitter debate over the meaning of the war. For Grant, and for most in the North, the Union victory was one of right over wrong, a vindication of free society; for many African Americans, the surrender marked the dawn of freedom itself. Lee, in contrast, believed that the Union victory was one of might over right: the vast impersonal Northern war machine had worn down a valorous and unbowed South. Lee was committed to peace, but committed, too, to the restoration of the South's political power within the Union and the perpetuation of white supremacy. Lee's vision of the war resonated broadly among Confederates and conservative northerners, and inspired Southern resistance to reconstruction.  Did America's best days lie in the past or in the future? For Lee, it was the past, the era of the founding generation. For Grant, it was the future, represented by Northern moral and material progress. They held, in the end, two opposite views of the direction of the country-and of the meaning of the war that had changed that country forever.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49564186673425,"sku":"GOR010283812","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50230348906769,"sku":"CIN0190217863VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345945137425,"sku":"CIN0190217863G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999633707281,"sku":"NIN9780190217860","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190217863.jpg?v=1750939803"},{"product_id":"southern-lady-yankee-spy-book-elizabeth-r-varon-9780195179897","title":"Southern Lady, Yankee Spy","description":"Northern sympathizer in the Confederate capital, daring spymaster, postwar politician: Elizabeth Van Lew was one of the most remarkable figures in American history, a woman who defied the conventions of the nineteenth-century South. In Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, historian Elizabeth Varon provides a gripping, richly researched account of the woman who led what one historian called \"the most productive espionage operation of the Civil War.\" Under the nose of the Confederate government, Van Lew ran a spy ring that gathered intelligence, hampered the Southern war effort, and helped scores of Union soldiers to escape from Richmond prisons.  Varon describes a woman who was very much a product of her time and place, yet continually took controversial stands--from her early efforts to free her family's slaves, to her daring wartime activities and beyond. Varon's powerful biography brings Van Lew to life, showing how she used the stereotypes of the day to confound Confederate authorities (who suspected her, but could not believe a proper Southern lady could be a spy), even as she brought together Union sympathizers at all levels of society, from slaves to slaveholders. After the war, a grateful President Ulysses S. Grant named her postmaster of Richmond--a remarkable break with custom for this politically influential post. But her Unionism, Republican politics, and outspoken support of racial justice earned her a lifetime of scorn in the former Confederate capital. Even today, Elizabeth Van Lew remains a controversial figure in her beloved Richmond, remembered as the \"Crazy Bet\" of Lost Cause propaganda. Elizabeth Varon's account rescues her from both derision and oblivion, depicting an intelligent, resourceful, highly principled woman who remained, as she saw it, true to her country to the end.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49590618030353,"sku":"GOR009046937","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50135870472465,"sku":"CIN0195179897VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345397322001,"sku":"CIN0195179897A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":50999792402705,"sku":"NIN9780195179897","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52102666092817,"sku":"CIN0195179897G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52480304709905,"sku":"NLS9780195179897","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195179897.jpg?v=1751037686"},{"product_id":"appomattox-book-elizabeth-r-varon-9780199751716","title":"Appomattox","description":"General Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac might look serene in the amber-tinted popular images of two gentlemen sharing cigars, but that image conceals seething debate over precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of United States would emerge from war. The combatants in that debate included the iconic Lee and Grant, but they also included a cast of characters previously overlooked, who brought their own understanding of the war's causes, consequences, and meaning.   Whereas April 1865 has been commonly viewed as a clear breaking point, Elizabeth Varon's Appomattox promises to connect the war to the immediate postwar in ways that have the potential to tell us far more than we currently know about how the creative potential generated by the destruction of war went unfulfilled in the decades that followed. Painting a portrait of this event between the triumphalist version of 1865 as a moment of strength and healing and a more persuasive but still incomplete portrait of the postwar painted by David Blight in Race and Reunion, Varon's work seeks to examine the surrender at Appomattox with an eye toward (a) narrating the events of April 1865, (b) exploring the immediate reactions, North and South, to the surrender, (c) exploring the political uses of the surrender during Reconstruction, and (d) challenging the popular, and comforting, perception that Appomattox inaugurated an easy end to a tragic war by beginning a process of reunion that reminded Americans that they were, after all, one people who shared far more similarities than differences. Varon will bring African American voices and attitudes into a story typically limited to white actors.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50414415216913,"sku":"CIN0199751714G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50451465797905,"sku":"GOR008613926","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697009430801,"sku":"NGR9780199751716","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50865671274769,"sku":"CIN0199751714VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000230674705,"sku":"NIN9780199751716","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52616704164113,"sku":"NLS9780199751716","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199751714.jpg?v=1751291051"},{"product_id":"disunion-book-elizabeth-r-varon-9780807871591","title":"Disunion!","description":"Language has a profound power to shape political reality. In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. This title deals with the most provocative word in the political vocabulary of antebellum America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50418982682897,"sku":"CIN0807871591G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50950519947537,"sku":"CIN0807871591VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007958876433,"sku":"NIN9780807871591","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52478476419345,"sku":"NLS9780807871591","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53148445770001,"sku":"GOR012741736","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53148940894481,"sku":"GOR006655065","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807871591.jpg?v=1763474810"},{"product_id":"disunion-book-elizabeth-r-varon-9780807832325","title":"Disunion!","description":"Language has a profound power to shape political reality. In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. This title deals with the most provocative word in the political vocabulary of antebellum America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50464927252753,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50464928039185,"sku":"CIN0807832324G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807832324.jpg?v=1772274931"},{"product_id":"we-mean-to-be-counted-book-elizabeth-r-varon-9780807846964","title":"We Mean to Be Counted","description":"Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics. Through their voluntary associations, legislative petitions, presence at political meetings and rallies, and published appeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to such controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society, to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties, to the literary defense of slavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, these women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as mediators who infused public life with the \"\"feminine\"\" virtues of compassion and harmony. |Demonstrates the widespread reform efforts and partisan political activities of elite white women in antebellum Virginia. An eye-opening contribution to the history of women's activism in the U.S.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007868895505,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007873843473,"sku":"NIN9780807846964","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52409919963409,"sku":"NLS9780807846964","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52734109679889,"sku":"CIN0807846961VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0807846961.jpg?v=1750745247"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-elizabeth-r-varon.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}