It is the purpose of this study to reveal that the morale of the southern civilians was an important factor in determining the fall of the Confederacy. At the close of the Civil War, the South was exhausted and weak, with only limited supplies to continue their defense. The Confederacy might have been rallied by the determination of its people, but they lacked such determination, for the hardships and grief they endured had turned their cause into a meaningless struggle. Therefore, the South fell because its strength depended upon the will of its population. This study is based on accounts by contemporaries in diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and journals, and it reflects their reaction to the collapse of homefront morale.

This thesis is a study of the Confederate command problem in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1861-1862.

Of the large amount of writings concerning the Civil War only a small percentage pertains to the Federal Navy's role. This is understandable since this was primarily a land war. A few of the Navy's exploits such as the capture of New Orleans, the sinking of the Alabama, the capture of the Florida in Brazilian waters, and the Trent affair received great amounts of publicity, but the majority of the naval activities were of a routine nature, each individually warranting little notice but collectively contributing immensely to the final Federal victory. The purpose of this paper is to show in detail the role of only a portion of the Navy, the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, during this struggle.

In late 1861, the Confederate Texas government commissioned Joseph W. Speight to raise an infantry battalion. Speight's Battalion became the Fifteenth Texas Infantry in April 1862, and saw almost no action for the next year as it marched throughout Texas, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory. In May 1863 the regiment was ordered to Louisiana and for the next seven months took an active role against Federal troops in the bayou country. From March to May 1864 the unit helped turn away the Union Red River Campaign. The regiment remained in the trans-Mississippi region until it disbanded in May 1865. The final chapter quantifies age, family status, wealthholdings, and casualties among the regiment's members.

This thesis explores the impact of home front and battlefield morale on Texas's civilian and military population during the Civil War. It addresses the creation, maintenance, and eventual surrender of Confederate nationalism and identity among Texans from five different counties: Colorado, Dallas, Galveston, Harrison, and Travis. The war divided Texans into three distinct groups: civilians on the home front, soldiers serving in theaters outside of the state, and soldiers serving within Texas's borders. Different environments, experiences, and morale affected the manner in which civilians and soldiers identified with the Confederate war effort. This study relies on contemporary letters, diaries, newspaper reports, and government records to evaluate how morale influenced national dedication and loyalty to the Confederacy among various segments of Texas's population.

This thesis combines a traditional narrative history of a Confederate artillery battery with a socio-economic study of its members. A database was constructed using the Compiled Service Records, 1860 census, and county tax rolls. The information revealed similarities between the unit's members and their home area. Captain James M. Daniel organized the battery in Paris, Texas and it entered Confederate service in January 1862. The battery served in Walker's Texas Division. It was part of a reserve force at the Battle of Milliken's Bend and was involved in the battles of Bayou Bourbeau, Mansfield, and Pleasant Hill. The battery also shelled Union ships on the Mississippi River. Daniel's Battery officially surrendered at Natchitoches, Louisiana, in May 1865.

Of the roughly 3,500 volunteer regiments and batteries organized by the Union army during the American Civil War, only a small fraction has been studied in any scholarly depth. Among those not yet examined by historians was one that typified the western armies commanded by the two greatest Federal generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. The Forty-fifth Illinois Volunteer Infantry was at Fort Donelson and Shiloh with Grant in 1862, with Grant and Sherman during the long Vicksburg campaign of 1862 and 1863, and with Sherman in the Meridian, Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolinas campaigns in the second half of the war. These Illinois men fought in several of the most important engagements in the western theater of the war and, in the spring of 1865, were present when the last important Confederate army in the east surrendered. The Forty-fifth was also well connected in western politics. Its unofficial name was the “Washburne Lead Mine Regiment,” in honor of U.S Representative Elihu B. Washburne, who used his contacts and influences to arm the regiment with the best weapons and equipment available early in the war. (The Lead Mine designation referred to the mining industry in northern Illinois.) In addition, several officers and enlisted men were personal friends and acquaintances of Ulysses Grant of Galena, Illinois, who honored the regiment for their bravery in the final attempt to break through the Confederate defenses at Vicksburg. The study of the Forty-fifth Illinois is important to the overall study of the Civil War because of the campaigns and battles the unit participated and fought in. The regiment was also one of the many Union regiments at the forefront of the Union leadership’s changing policy toward the Confederate populace and war making industry. In this role the regiment witnessed the impact of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Of interest then, are the members’ views on the freeing of the slaves. Also of interest are their views on the arming of the slaves into black regiments, and on the Copperhead, anti-war movement in the Union. With ample sources on the regiment, and with no formal history of the unit having been written or published, a scholarly, modern study of the Lead Mine regiment therefore seems in order, as it would provide further insight into the Civil War from the Union soldiers’ perspective and into the sacrifices the men made in order to preserve their country.

This dissertation analyzes selected pieces of work related to the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) produced during the twenty-first-century as cultural artifacts to be considered in their historical and socio-political context. Specifically, my dissertation focuses on the relationship between the way the conflict is depicted and the message it conveys. Parting from the premise that there has been an overproduction of lieu de mémoire that has transformed the Spanish war into a cultural trend, the civil war-esque, I study a number of humor works. Precisely, these humorous works deconstruct such trend by considering its most common characteristics: the use of metafiction and nostalgia. The Introduction presents the socio-political situation of contemporary Spain, the civil war-esque trend, and different categories of humor. In the first chapter I focus on the TV-series Plaza de España (2011). By combining the theoretical framework of the sitcom and the Critical Analysis of Discourse, I demonstrate that the program reinforces the official message in regard to the Spanish recent past. In the second chapter I examine the novel La comedia salvaje (2009) by José Ovejero. This parody, understood by the lens of Bakhtin, invites the readers to be skeptical about what they know and what they have been told about the war. In the third chapter I study the film The Last Circus I (2010) by Álex de la Iglesia. Departing from an esperpento, the film leaves this genre behind and transforms itself into a satire which demythifies the traditional research method, such as visiting archives or interviewing witnesses, and opts for imagination to reproduce a traumatic past. Finally, the goal of this dissertation is to help envisage that a wider, and at the same time critical representation, of the Spanish Civil War its possible, and in turn could lead on to a potential change in the Spanish current cultural production as well as its social and political situation.

Louisiana's Red River region was shaped by and founded on the logic of racial power, the economics of slavery, and white supremacy. The alluvial soil provided wealth for the mobile, market-driven slaveholders but created a cold, brutal world for the commoditized slaves that cleared the land and cultivated cotton. Racial bondage defined the region, and slaveholders' commitment to mastery and Confederate doctrine continued after the Civil War. This work argues that when freedom arrived, this unbroken fidelity to mastery and to the inheritances and ideology of slavery gave rise to a visceral regime of violence. Continuity, not change, characterized the region. The Red River played a significant role in regional settlement and protecting this distorted racial dynamic. Racial bondage grounded the region's economy and formed the heart of white identity and black exploitation. Here, the long arcs of mastery, racial conditioning, and ideological continuities were deeply entrenched even as the nation underwent profound changes from 1820 to 1880. In this thesis, the election of 1860, the Civil War, and emancipation are not viewed as fundamental breaks or compartmentalized epochs in southern history. By contrast, on plantations along the Red River, both racial mastery and power endured after emancipation. Based on extensive archival research, this thesis considers how politics, racial ideologies, and environmental and financial drivers impacted the nature of slavery, Confederate commitment, and the parameters of freedom in this region, and by extension, the nation. Widespread Reconstruction violence climaxed with the Colfax Massacre and firmly cemented white power, vigilantism, and racial dominance within the regional culture. Freedpeople were relegated to the margins as whites reasserted their control over Reconstruction. The violent and contested nature of freedom highlighted the adherence to the power structure and ideological inheritances of slavery. From bondage to freedom, the Red River region remained unreconstructed.

This study was designed to determine (a) the extent of the coverage in total wordage; (b) the direction and intensity of the articles; and (c) the impression conveyed by each newspaper toward the two main parties of the war. The findings show that (a) The New York Times devoted nearly twice as many words to the war as The Times of London; (b) the majority of the articles were neutral; (c) The New York Times was more favorable to the leftists and was as favorable to the rightists as The Times of London; and (d) the two newspapers were consistent in direction, and all deviation from neutrality remained within the limits of mild intensity.