• Whose War was it Anyway?
• Anne Sarah Rubin (bio)

When three of America's foremost historians of the American Civil War publish sweeping overviews at almost the same time, it seems like a good opportunity to take stock of the state of the field. We are six years past the end of the sesquicentennial, which many scholars hoped would spark a resurgence of public interest in the period. That did not happen—at least not to the extent of the centennial—but the past six years have seen a very public reassessment of the place of Confederate iconography in the American landscape, and with it a realization that the Civil War, and the long shadow of American slavery, still resonates. As we saw over the summer of 2020, when protests over the deaths of George Floyd and other African Americans led to the removal of scores of Confederate monuments, the Civil War still has the power to inflame, and many of its lessons remain unlearned.

Even without the hook of the sesquicentennial or public protests, Civil War historians are blessed with a broader audience than our colleagues in many other subfields. This is both a blessing—our books have greater commercial potential—and a responsibility to make our work accessible to general readers rather than simply writing for the historiography. All three of these books succeed on that count; in fact, their utility for scholars and students is more varied.

In the introduction to The Women's Fight, Thavolia Glymph describes four Civil Wars that historians explore: armies fighting on the battlefields, conflicts [End Page 259]on the home front, the slaves' war for freedom, and the war in the far West. These three books address these multiple wars to a varying degree, with the West receiving the least attention. I would add two more wars to this formula: the war over meaning and memory, and the war of Reconstruction. Politics, in statehouses and Washington and Richmond, cut across these various conflicts. Fortunately, all of these volumes recognize the intimate interplay between the home front, the battlefield, and the political arena, sparing us the tired debate over whether one should be privileged over the other.

Elizabeth R. Varon, having written about the long antecedents of the Civil War in Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859and its putative end in Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, turns to the entirety of the conflict in Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War. Compressing the sweep of the entire war into a single volume is no simple feat, and Varon does it both concisely (at 434 pages of text, the book is half the length of James McPherson's 1988 classic Battle Cry of Freedom), and elegantly. The narrative flows smoothly, linking political, military, and social vignettes and showing the interplay among the various facets of the war. While I imagine Varon wrote with a trade or popular audience in mind, Oxford University Press has issued it in a so-called College Edition as well, and that is the edition under review. The text is unchanged save for the addition of a timeline in the front and a glossary and list of suggested readings in the back, along with a host of electronic resources including primary sources and flashcards.

Varon organizes her work around the idea of "deliverance" as a political metaphor that unified disparate groups of Northerners into a Unionist coalition. According to Varon, Northerners subscribed to what she calls the "deluded masses...

• 究竟是谁的战争？
• 安妮莎拉鲁宾（生物）

当三位美国最重要的美国内战历史学家几乎同时发表全面概述时，这似乎是评估该领域状况的好机会。我们已经过去了 200 周年，许多学者希望这会在这一时期引发公众兴趣的复苏。这并没有发生——至少没有达到百年纪念的程度——但在过去的六年里，人们对同盟肖像在美国景观中的地位进行了一次非常公开的重新评估，并意识到内战和漫长的美国奴隶制的阴影，至今仍能引起共鸣。正如我们在 2020 年夏天看到的那样，当对乔治·弗洛伊德和其他非裔美国人之死的抗议导致数十座邦联纪念碑被拆除时，内战仍然有点燃的力量，

即使没有百年纪念或公众抗议的钩子，内战历史学家也有幸拥有比我们在许多其他子领域的同事更广泛的受众。这既是一种祝福——我们的书具有更大的商业潜力——也是一种责任，让我们的作品能够被普通读者所接受，而不仅仅是为史学而写作。所有这三本书都在这一点上取得了成功。事实上，它们对学者和学生的效用更加多样化。

在《妇女之战》的介绍中，塔沃利亚·格兰芬 (Thavolia Glymph) 描述了历史学家探索的四场内战：战场上的军队、国内战线的冲突[第 259 页]、奴隶争取自由的战争以及遥远的西部战争。这三本书在不同程度上解决了这些多场战争，西方受到的关注最少。我想在这个公式中再添加两场战争：关于意义和记忆的战争，以及重建战争。政治，在州议会大厦、华盛顿和里士满，跨越了这些不同的冲突。幸运的是，所有这些书都承认了前线、战场和政治舞台之间的密切相互作用，让我们免于关于一个人是否应该比另一个人享有特权的冗长辩论。

伊丽莎白·R·瓦隆 (Elizabeth R. Varon) 在《不团结！：美国内战的到来，1789-1859及其假定的终结：内战结束时的胜利、失败和自由》中写道：，转向拯救军队：内战的新历史中的整个冲突。将整场战争的全貌压缩成一卷并非易事，而瓦隆则做到了简洁（434 页的文本，这本书的长度是詹姆斯·麦克弗森 1988 年经典的自由之战的一半）)，而且优雅。叙事流畅，将政治、军事和社会小插曲联系起来，展示了战争各个方面之间的相互作用。虽然我想象 Varon 是为贸易或大众读者写作的，但牛津大学出版社也发行了所谓的大学版，这就是正在审查的版本。除了在前面增加了时间线，在后面增加了词汇表和建议阅读清单，以及包括主要资源和抽认卡在内的大量电子资源外，文本没有变化。

Varon 围绕“解救”的想法组织她的工作，将其作为一个政治隐喻，将不同的北方人群体统一为一个工会联盟。根据瓦伦的说法，北方人订阅了她所谓的“被迷惑的群众......