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Comments

[trouble]

I'm a non-American learning about the Civil War for the first time. I am completely clueless. I have today sorted out that Confederates mean South and .... now I can't remember which ones are North. Only a Librarian can help me! A book that assumes no knowledge about the Civil War would be awesome.

[octopedingenue]

Are there particular aspects of the war that interest you, people or places with involvement that you're keen on? I mean, little has obsessed the U.S. like its Civil War, spawning a bibliography into the tens of thousands with doctoral theses written on innumerable highly specific sub-subjects (white women abolitionists! black Confederate soldiers! popular songs of the era! War re-enactors!) that you could spend years on. And the sesquicentennial is going to quatripledruple that.

And it's difficult once you get into the sub-subjects to know when to stop...I mean, I'm in the south and just thinking about, one example, race relationships from the Civil War, I don't know where to draw the line of "Here endeth direct effects of the Civil War upon this subject," because it goes Civil War > Reconstruction > Jim Crow > Civil Rights Movement hitting each other like dominoes.

That said, my Pet History Person is all "WOO BRUCE CATTON," and James Ford Rhodes' A History of the Civil War, 1861-1865 is entirely online and won the 1918 Pulitzer, though it is now super old and catches flak about racism/Reconstruction. In fact Civil War stuff has won a ton of Pulitzers (did I mention little obsesses the U.S. like this?).

Aaaand now I'm going to make historians everywhere aghast by pimping The Mental Floss History of the United States and YA-ish book The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History, which are obviously gunning for general overview + obscure weird bits + rule of funny over serious historical analyses. But they are quite useful in that they have to explain the history they're joking about so that you know why the jokes are funny. (Also they're hilarious.)

TL;DR answer: I have no idea D: D: could you be more specific?