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When we think of the aftermath of the Civil War we tend to remember and fixate on the rebuilding of the South, the institution of Jim Crow, and the U.S. expand westward. However, the world in which the Civil War created is much more complicated and complex then we realize with relatively untold narratives that provide a greater understanding of what happened once the smoke had cleared of the battlefields and the dead mostly accounted for. As such the goal of The World The Civil War Made is to highlight and ask precisely how the the changes that rippled out from the Civil War did and did not echo in people’s lives and communities. They portray a federal government located in outpost, often beset and besieged able to enforce its policies in concentrated areas but hard pressed to extend its sovereignty thought the land. Using court documents, personal testimonies, newspaper articles, maps, and even tribe dissolution forms the authors within the book create the image of a nation defined by shared assumptions about democratic processes and peaceful governance; the essays within the book portray a place convulsed by violence and a government stymied by common people’s stubborn assertions of power and prerogative. In the end they seek to invite us to envision the enduring illiberal and chaotic qualities of life in the postwar U.S. as being imperfect in consolidating liberal nation, but as central to the American experience and as such seek to answer the question how the Civil War change the nation (pg. 3).
The greatest strength of most of the essays in the book which give the reader a better understanding of the world that Civil War are the ones centered around ethnic minorities and how they struggled with ownership of their identity and whether it be their property such as land or their physical body. Similarly to Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire, Dr. Stephanie M.H. Camp’s Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, and Dr. Ari Kelman This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War which give agency to minority groups in their respected books. I also would agree with Mark that the book is more about “local resistance on the ground made it difficult to enforce Reconstruction protections due to the federal governments reach was overstressed” and as such, they took matters into their own hands. In chapter 2, Stacey Smith discussed how merchants and workers protested the unfair wages the received to the Govoner of California and stated that they were not coolies if by that word you mean bound men or slaves (pg. 63). While In chapter 3, Stephen Kantrowitz argued that when the Ho-Chunk Tribe of Wisconsin neither used the words “citizenship” and “civilization” they seem to have attached meanings and hopes to them quite different from those intended by policymakers nor did they seek assimilation into the US nor did they imagine they could fully escape it (pg. 99). In chapter 6, Kidada E. Williams displayed the bravery of African American taking the stand and testifying in courts down south in addition to how emancipation allowed many African Americans to assert new control over their lives through economic means and migration to the Western Territories (pg. 173). Finally, in chapter 10, Crystal N. Feimster traces the black women’s resistance to sexual violence whose crusade for sexual justice took many forms written protest to violent resistance in order to challenge the panoply laws, traditions, and ideas that reinforce white men’s sexual power (pg. 251).
The biggest complement I can give The World The Civil War Made is that it seeks to to tell the unknown stories that are needed to be heard in order for anyone to understand America after the war. For example before this reading, I never heard about Elly S. Parker. I thought C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa did an amazing job bring to life a relatively unknown historical figure to hopefully a wider audience. As such, one can see the significance of Parker’s mission of having the government protect Native tribes form settlers to maintain their tribal sovereignty (pg. 190). While Barbra Krauthamer on the other display that yes, Native American did own slaves which is not really mentioned lot but she takes to one step further by showing how they ended the practice of slavery which I have never personally come cross in any history book. Since she states that black people in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations waited longer that most before gaining their freedom and clear picture of their future but they still had plans and ideas about their lives as free people in the nations should look like (pg 232).