Here are 100 books that Clash of Extremes fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was growing up, I had no idea that New York State had 200 years of slavery. And when I realized that my Dutch American ancestors had been some of the most fervent enslavers, I knew I had to know more. It wasn’t until I met Eleanor Mire, a woman who is descended from the very people that my family enslaved, that my story became fuller. We realized that, through rape, we shared ancestors, which makes us “linked descendants.” Rather than turning away from the upsetting history, we became friends who knew we needed to keep learning and tell the stories of those who had been lost.
Before I read this book, I had no idea just how much slavery’s economic benefits to the North allowed so many individuals to look the other way. This was the first book that underlined for me why all Americans, Northerners, and Southerners, need to own and understand our history.
The chapter “Plunder for Pianos” on the ivory trade and piano keys forever changed my sense of how the Triangle Trade operated.
A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery
“The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle
The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted…
I am an author, editor, and former history teacher and curriculum writer with a special interest in Southern history, particularly the Confederate era. I have written and published two books on lesser-known aspects of the Confederacy, the civilian government (Confederate Cabinet Departments and Secretaries), and religious work in the Confederate armies (Christ in Camp andCombat: Religious Work in the Confederate Armies). I taught on various levels, from junior high through college, and have B.S. and M.S. degrees with post-graduate work in Southern history and religion.
Economic issues, including shortages of staple consumer goods, plagued the South throughout the war. Wherever a shortage existed, however, so did Southern efforts to find substitutes to meet the needs. Some of those substitutes were quite surprising and innovative.
First published by the University of South Carolina in 1952, Ersatz in the Confederacy remains the definitive study of the South's desperate struggle to overcome critical shortages of food, medicine, clothing, household goods, farming supplies, and tools during the Civil War.
Mary Elizabeth Massey's seminal work carefully documents the ingenuity of the Confederates as they coped with shortages of manufactured goods and essential commodities―including grain, coffee, sugar, and butter―that previously had been imported from the northern states or from England. Creative Southerners substituted sawdust for soap, pigs' tails and ears for Christmas tree ornaments, leaves for mattress stuffing, okra seeds…
I am an author, editor, and former history teacher and curriculum writer with a special interest in Southern history, particularly the Confederate era. I have written and published two books on lesser-known aspects of the Confederacy, the civilian government (Confederate Cabinet Departments and Secretaries), and religious work in the Confederate armies (Christ in Camp andCombat: Religious Work in the Confederate Armies). I taught on various levels, from junior high through college, and have B.S. and M.S. degrees with post-graduate work in Southern history and religion.
Although the South was not considered an industrial power, depending as it did on a primarily agricultural economy, the necessities of the war forced it to move toward greater and various emphases on industries and manufacturing. The strides it made, especially given the strictures of war, including a manpower shortage and a shrinking geographical base, are truly remarkable.
By 1860 the South ranked high among the developed countries of the world in per capita income and life expectancy and in the number of railroad miles, telegraph lines, and institutions of higher learning. Only the major European powers and the North had more cotton and woolen spindles. This book examines the Confederate military's program to govern this prosperous industrial base by a quartermaster system. By commandeering more than half the South's produced goods for the military, the quartermaster general, in a drift toward socialism, appropriated hundreds of mills and controlled the flow of southern factory commodities. The most controversial…
I am an author, editor, and former history teacher and curriculum writer with a special interest in Southern history, particularly the Confederate era. I have written and published two books on lesser-known aspects of the Confederacy, the civilian government (Confederate Cabinet Departments and Secretaries), and religious work in the Confederate armies (Christ in Camp andCombat: Religious Work in the Confederate Armies). I taught on various levels, from junior high through college, and have B.S. and M.S. degrees with post-graduate work in Southern history and religion.
Although many (even most) historians relegate religion to the periphery of the history of the war, Nichols-Belt shows it to be a critical ingredient of that history. Moreover, although historians who admit the importance of religion to the South’s conduct of the war, most of them focus primarily on the armies in the East. Nichols-Belt shines a light on the just-as-important influence of religion in the armies of the Western theater, specifically the Army of Tennessee.
The Civil War was trying, bloody and hard-fought combat for both sides. What was it, then, that sustained soldiers low on supplies and morale? For the Army of Tennessee, it was religion. Onward Southern Soldiers: Religion and the Army of Tennessee in the Civil War explores the significant impact of religion on every rank, from generals to chaplains to common soldiers. It took faith to endure overwhelming adversity. Religion united troops, informing both why and how they fought and providing the rationale for enduring great hardship for the Confederate cause. Using primary source material such as diaries, letters, journals and…
I find the early days of the Confederacy to be fascinating, a chance to look at Americans in the act of nation-making while surrounded by fear and crisis. Far more than in the convention of 1776, this episode offers sources that allow us to look inside their motives, and to evaluate them both as impractical rebels, and social and political idealists [albeit their idealism was always encased within the confines of a slave society]. Having written biographies of Jefferson Davis, Alexander H Stephens, Robert Toombs, and other Confederate politicians, this subject is a natural object of my interest. While I do not at all agree with or endorse the political measures they took in the secession crisis, I can feel some empathy for them and their people who felt themselves caught in a no-win position, facing [in their view] the possible destruction of their economy, society, and culture.
This new 2020 book is a fresh synthesis of the scholarly work that has been done on secession and the young Confederacy in the past 30 years and has much that is new to offer Its treatment of the weeks in Montgomery is rather brief, but insightful, and overall it makes a fine introduction to the political life of the CSA.
Regardless of whether they owned slaves, Southern whites lived in a world defined by slavery. As shown by their blaming British and Northern slave traders for saddling them with slavery, most were uncomfortable with the institution. While many wanted it ended, most were content to leave that up to God. All that changed with the election of Abraham Lincoln.
Rebels in the Making is a narrative-driven history of how and why secession occurred. In this work, senior Civil War historian William L. Barney narrates the explosion of the sectional conflict into secession and civil war. Carefully examining the events in…
What could be cooler to a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s than the Civil War? TV spoon-fed us westerns—Bonanza, F-Troop, The Lone Ranger, and The Wild, Wild West. Many of the stories were set during the Civil War or had characters molded by it. And then, somewhere in the mid-1960s, my parents took me to a civil war reenactment. Guns cracked. Cannons boomed, and men fell. I was hooked. I’ve devoured every Civil War book I could get my hands on for the past fifty years and watched every movie remotely connected to the subject. So, it’s only natural I wrote a book about it.
We often think about the Civil War in terms of battles, casualties, and fatalities, which isn’t surprising as war is always considered a bloody business sprinkled with death and destruction. However, many historians overlook that it wasn’t just bullets that won the war. Technological innovations changed the battlefield. For example, Samuel M. Pook teamed up with John Eads to design a new style of armored battleship—dubbed Pook’s Turtles. Just weeks after the gunboats were commissioned, they enabled Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral Andrew Hull Foote to take Forts Henry and Donelson. Later, the fleet assisted John Pope in taking Island 10 and again in the Vicksburg campaign.
Christopher Spencer developed a repeating rifle that fired seven balls in quick succession. Abraham Lincoln’s first test determined the gun was a dud. However, the second test went off without a hitch, and the war department ordered 2,000 Spencer Rifles. Many other…
Before the Civil War, America had undergone a technological revolution that made large-scale industry possible, yet, except for the expanding reach of railroads and telegraph lines, the country remained largely rural, with only pockets of small manufacturing. Then the war came and woke the sleeping giant. The Civil War created a wave of unprecedented industrial growth and development, producing a revolution in new structures, ideas, and inventions that sustained the struggle and reshaped America.
Energized by the country's dormant potential and wealth of natural resources, individuals of vision, organizational talent, and capital took advantage of the opportunity war provided. Their…
I grew up listening to my grandfathers tell stories about the Great Depression (1930s). My cousins would want me to go out and play, but I wanted to stay indoors and listen to the stories. The Depression proved my grandfathers were not the best cotton farmers, but they were good storytellers, and I ended up an economics professor. Along the way, I ran across a thought from renowned British philosopher Francis Bacon: “Histories make men wise, poets, witty, mathematics, subtle;” Modern economics has gone in for subtlety, and maybe is a little too careless of wisdom. This thought sent me delving deeper into economic history, and I ended up writing five books in economics history.
Here is a stimulating and suggestive book, in 18 close-packed chapters, rich in fresh and illuminating insights. The scope, depth, and harmony of this book, strengthened with minute elaboration and carefulness, make it a work of permanent value. Missed here is the dogmatic readiness to force many intricate and diverse things to accommodate themselves to a few simple formulas. The book’s very descriptive title reveals its subject, which is presented with the utmost clearness, thoughtful intelligence, and adequacy of analysis, It is a welcomed reminder that time is the greatest innovator, spawning economic developments missed by the blind mechanisms of theoretical formulas. There is the accuracy of knowledge throughout, thoroughness in setting it forth, and admirable clearness.
In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the…
After a life of teaching and writing, I have been reading widely in the literature on the Civil War North to set the stage for my next project, a book on the life and times of my great-grandfather, who has loomed over my imagination since I was a boy during the years of the Civil War Bicentennial. Both a soldier and politician, he emerged as one the most militant of the Radical Republicans in the early years of Reconstruction. What follows is my personal list of very important, very readable, recent books on the Northern experience of the war that I will have by my side as I start writing.
A number of years ago, when I was reading through a folder of antislavery petitions at the National Archives, I found a misfiled petition asking for federal funding for an agricultural college in Iowa. Ariel Ron demonstrates how this misfiling illustrates a larger story that runs from agriculture in the early republic to the post-Civil War federal bureaucracy, through the priorities of northern farmers: improvement and justice.
Rather than an industrial behemoth, the pre-Civil War North was dominated by farmers who wanted to modernize their production and who moved from a diffuse program of reform to a campaign for federal funding for state agricultural colleges. Already hostile to slavery, they resented the power of southern planters in Congress who consistently blocked their petitions.
Thus, one of the results of the outbreak of war would be the triumph of a long campaign, deeply entwined with antislavery opinion, that resulted in the…
How a massive agricultural reform movement led by northern farmers before the Civil War recast Americans' relationships to market forces and the state.
Recipient of The Center for Civil War Research's 2021 Wiley-Silver Book Prize, Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society
In this sweeping look at rural society from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Ariel Ron argues that agricultural history is central to understanding the nation's formative period. Upending the myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South, Grassroots Leviathan traces the rise of a powerful agricultural…
The fundamental connection between law and economics rules most of the world. This is especially true in romantic relationships, whether the parties realize it or not. Being “Janites” ourselves, in addition to our day jobs of family law professor and economic consultant, we could not help but read Jane Austen and be blown away by her genius understanding of both law and economics. Moreover, the principles she draws out that govern much of her characters’ decision-making are just as applicable today in the world of online dating and Tinder. We hope our book enlightens you on law and economics in new, surprising, and romantic ways.
The world is driven by incentives. Much of economics is not obscure theory but practically understanding how incentives affect decision-making.
Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economicsprovides a solid foundation for understanding how our lives revolve around economics and why understanding economic principles is critically important for evaluating the social and geopolitical world around us.
This book was important in our analysis of Jane Austen’s work, as her use of economic principles in romance is what causes her work to be loved for centuries.
This is a new edition of the best-selling economics book that won't put you to sleep. In our challenging economic climate, this perennial favourite of students and general readers includes commentary on hot topics such as automation, trade and income inequality. Ten years after the financial crisis, Naked Economics examines how policymakers managed the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
I’m fascinated by systems of thought and very interested in understanding how we can improve our ability to create a better society for all. I think the past makes a good laboratory for investigating these kinds of questions. I got interested in early modern economic theory while researching the English East India Company for my dissertation in the sociology department of Columbia University, which was a great place for historical and computational sociology. I now teach economic sociology and theory as a professor at Yale University, another institution with amazing strengths in history, data science, and computational methods.
Tribe is a master of his subject, and this book has the feel of a magnum opus. It is densely packed and full of interesting tidbits, and you will be amazed at just how recent economics really is. The added bonus is all the insight into the development of the modern research university. I am in the middle of this book as it just came out, but the scale of the contribution (large) is already clear.
An accessible account of the role of the modern university in the creation of economics
During the late nineteenth century concerns about international commercial rivalry were often expressed in terms of national provision for training and education, and the role of universities in such provision. It was in this context that the modern university discipline of economics emerged. The first undergraduate economics program was inaugurated in Cambridge in 1903; but this was merely a starting point.
Constructing Economic Science charts the path through commercial education to the discipline of economics and the creation of an economics curriculum that could then…
