Books by "C. William Hesseltine"
3 books found
On December 11, 1863, a US brigadier general and a Confederate artillery captain met on board the packet steamer Diligent on the Mississippi River below Vicksburg. The Confederate officer had not come on board on official business; he was a paroled prisoner of war. The brigadier general was his older brother, who had learned of the younger man’s capture three weeks earlier at Confederate Fort Semmes, on the Texas coast, and had arranged to have him brought from New Orleans to Vicksburg to be given medical care at the Federal garrison. The American Civil War has rightly been called a war of brothers; Henry, Jasper, and William Maltby were three such brothers. The scene recounted above was between Jasper and William, who had not seen each other in several years since Jasper had left their birth home in Ohio, but who met frequently over the months following their reunion, their familial bond overriding their political allegiances. The three brothers’ lives cover the critical years of Civil War and Reconstruction, a time when Jasper devotedly served the Union cause, while Henry and William became outspoken secessionists, operating Confederate newspapers in Corpus Christi, Matamoros, and Brownsville, eventually as a thorn in the side of Reconstruction officials. Despite their own Southern sympathies, the two Confederates cherished their Yankee brother, whose bravery at Fort Donelson and Vicksburg took a heavy toll on his health and eventually cost him his life. Both Rebels named a son in honor of their hero brother. Combining detailed research in William Maltby’s personal papers with contemporary accounts, military and court records, and the editorials of the two who became newspapermen, veteran scholar and educator Norman Delaney has created a vibrant story of how war can affect a family and a community.
"A significant contribution to the current understanding of southern Appalachia's place within the South and the nation." — The Journal of American History Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region's wartime loyalties. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe's essays consider a multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders' dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. Devoting attention to how truths from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations, he considers novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how their work has contributed much to either our understanding?or misunderstanding?of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination. "Each essay is a gem of historical and critical analysis that adds greatly to our understanding of the Appalachian past." —Dwight Billings, coeditor of Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century
Doyle shows that, though setting and circumstances may change, POW stories share a common structure and are driven by similar themes. Capture, incarceration, isolation, propaganda, torture, capitulation or resistance, death, spiritual quest, escape, liberation and repatriation are recurrent key motifs in these narratives.