Books
“A stunning portrayal of a tragedy endured and survived by women.” —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass
“McCurry has helped to transform our understanding of the Confederacy—and of its impossibility.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
We think of war as a man’s world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America’s bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman’s war. Read more.
When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Read more.
“A strikingly original work, one which manages to say important new things about subjects that have attracted the attention of generations of scholars.” —Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding
In this innovative study of the South Carolina Low Country, author Stephanie McCurry explores the place of the yeomanry in plantation society—the complex web of domestic and public relations within which they were enmeshed, and the contradictory politics of slave society by which that class of small farmers extracted the privileges of masterhood from the region’s powerful planters. Read more.
New Book Project
A Revolution in Every Household: A New History of Reconstruction
(Under contract with Harper Collins)
With the end of the American Civil War the secrets of slavery spilled out, including about the rape of Black women and paternity of hundreds of thousands of children born as a result. The sexual violence of slavery set an explosive charge beneath every negotiation over the terms of freedom. To do justice to that recognition requires a new history of Reconstruction that grasps the “monstrous intimacies” slavery involved and the lasting consequences.
A Revolution in Every Household is a book about the post-Civil War United States that takes the measure of what reconstructing involved in intimate as well as public life. It conceptualizes Reconstruction as a postwar story of consequence for later conflicts, and the intimate as a domain of power that reframes the challenge of the era.