"Race and Recruitment pulls readers right into the middle of the most important scholarly conversations about race, slavery, and the Civil War that have taken place over the last half century. Each of these sixteen essays has stood the test of time, asking the big questions and offering the answers that have forever changed the way historians talk about the middle of the nineteenth century. The resulting volume is a showcase of compelling research, writing, and thinking from some of the nation’s most influential historians. It should command a prominent spot on Civil War bookshelves.” - Amy Murrell Taylor, author of The Divided Family in Civil War America

The second volume of the best from Civil War History

For more than fifty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America's greatest struggle. The Kent State University Press is pleased to present this second volume in its multivolume series reintroducing the most influential of the more than 500 articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy, and tactics, to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women’s issues, from the war’s causes to its aftermath and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published pioneering and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of the Middle Period.

In this second volume of the series, John David Smith has selected groundbreaking essays by David Blight, Eugene Genovese, Mark Neely Jr., Brooks Simpson, and other scholars that examine slavery, abolitionism, emancipation, Lincoln and race, and African Americans as soldiers and veterans. His introduction assesses the contribution of each article to our understanding of the Civil War era.

Those with an interest in the issues, struggles, and controversies that divided a nation will welcome this essential collection.