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And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation.  Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50697489842449,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50697493545233,"sku":"NGR9781469624273","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52126909399313,"sku":"NLS9781469624273","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52749923582225,"sku":"NIN9781469624273","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1469624273.jpg?v=1753002126"},{"product_id":"with-malice-toward-some-book-william-a-blair-9781469614052","title":"With Malice Toward Some","description":"Few issues created greater consensus among Civil War-era northerners than the belief that the secessionists had committed treason. But as William A. Blair shows in this engaging history, the way politicians, soldiers, and civilians dealt with disloyalty varied widely. Citizens often moved more swiftly than federal agents in punishing traitors in their midst, forcing the government to rethink legal practices and definitions. In reconciling the northern contempt for treachery with a demonstrable record of judicial leniency toward the South, Blair illuminates the other ways that northerners punished perceived traitors, including confiscating slaves, arresting newspaper editors for expressions of free speech, and limiting voting. Ultimately, punishment for treason extended well beyond wartime and into the framework of Reconstruction policies, including the construction of the Fourteenth Amendment.   Establishing how treason was defined not just by the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the courts but also by the general public, Blair reveals the surprising implications for North and South alike.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50936440389905,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50936440586513,"sku":"CIN1469614057VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1469652099.jpg?v=1763472368"},{"product_id":"record-of-murders-and-outrages-book-william-a-blair-9781469663456","title":"The Record of Murders and Outrages","description":"Examines the Freedmen's Bureau 's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. William Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51028081606929,"sku":"NIN9781469663456","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52744122302737,"sku":"CIN1469663457G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1469663449.jpg?v=1752987481"},{"product_id":"cities-of-the-dead-book-william-a-blair-9780807828960","title":"Cities of the Dead","description":"Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged. Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation. 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These ten essays include courage on the battlefield but reflect the current trends to understand the motivations of soldiers and the impact of war on civilians, rather than focusing solely on battles or leadership.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51888719528209,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51888720118033,"sku":"NGR9780271058429","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53181235069201,"sku":"NLS9780271058429","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780271058429.jpg?v=1754655068"},{"product_id":"with-malice-toward-some-book-william-a-blair-9781469652092","title":"With Malice Toward Some","description":"Few issues created greater consensus among Civil War-era northerners than the belief that the secessionists had committed treason. But as William A. Blair shows in this engaging history, the way politicians, soldiers, and civilians dealt with disloyalty varied widely. Citizens often moved more swiftly than federal agents in punishing traitors in their midst, forcing the government to rethink legal practices and definitions. In reconciling the northern contempt for treachery with a demonstrable record of judicial leniency toward the South, Blair illuminates the other ways that northerners punished perceived traitors, including confiscating slaves, arresting newspaper editors for expressions of free speech, and limiting voting. Ultimately, punishment for treason extended well beyond wartime and into the framework of Reconstruction policies, including the construction of the Fourteenth Amendment.   Establishing how treason was defined not just by the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the courts but also by the general public, Blair reveals the surprising implications for North and South alike.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52653392658705,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52653392855313,"sku":"NIN9781469652092","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781469652092.jpg?v=1762209015"},{"product_id":"politician-goes-to-war-book-william-a-blair-9780271026183","title":"A Politician Goes to War","description":"This last known work of noted historian Bell Irvin Wiley reveals the private mind of John White Geary, a Union general from Pennsylvania, through his Civil War letters to his wife, Mary. Wiley had selected these roughly 200 letters for publication, but the unfinished manuscript lay undiscovered for twelve years after the historian's death. The letters provide a rare glimpse of the two main theaters of war through the eyes of a general officer. Geary saw action at Cedar Mountain and Gettysburg in the Virginia theater and in the major campaigns in the west—from lifting the siege at Chattanooga to marching with William T. Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas.  The fascination Geary's letters held for Wiley, the quintessential scholar of the common person, is clear: the letters of an uncommon man reveal ordinary concerns about children, money, home, and religion that linked Geary to many on both sides of the war. Geary's letters also show another side of the officer, that of the consummate politician who knew that military service provided capital for future political campaigns. Through intense self-promotion, he had fashioned a reputation that served him well in gaining respected political posts both before and after the war: he fought in the Mexican War and served as the first mayor of San Francisco and as territorial governor of Kansas during the period known as \"Bloody Kansas,\" in addition to winning two terms as governor of Pennsylvania after the war. Ultimately, the letters of John White Geary show how a political general plied his trade. 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But another history lies beneath the landscape—an African American freedom struggle that has been erased from the landscape. Before the Civil War, enslaved African Americans labored, escaped, raised families, and died at Arlington on a plantation founded by George Washington Parke Custis and inherited by the wife of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. After the Union army confiscated the Lee estate, Freedman’s Village was established on the site, offering refuge to a vibrant community of thousands of newly emancipated African Americans. In creating a neighborhood with homes, schools, businesses, and networks with free Blacks in the nation’s capital and beyond, Arlington’s freedpeople played a consequential—if largely forgotten—role in advancing African American liberty and equality through the rest of the nineteenth century.     This deeply researched and accessibly written story brings Arlington’s African American past to vivid life. 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