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Title: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America by William C. Davis ISBN: 0-684-86585-8 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.41 (17 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America
Comment: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America written by William C. Davis is a book on political history of the Southern State during the time of the Civil War.
Davis concentrates on the political, social, and economic subjects of the Civil War era. This is an excellently, well-written book and a revealing, preceptive work giving the reader a fuller, more complete reference to the life and times of the people durning the Civil War.
While previous histories have focused on familiar commanders such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson... this book focuses on a broader scope. We get to read about such characters as Robert Barnwell Rhett and William L. Yancey, who pushed for secession long before the public supported it; to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, who persuaded many Southerners of the natural inferiority of their slaves; to the woman of Richmond, who rioted over bread shortages in 1863.
Reading this book gives you, the reader, a more complete picture of what life was like... not the moonlight and magnolia as portrayed in other books... but down to earth portrails. You can see through the references that Davis spent a lot of time on his research... primary research has ranged across the 800 odd newspapers being printed durning this timeframe.
You get a vivid, full society view of the political and economic conflits beneath it more loudly publicized military battles. Marauders who preyed on their fellow Confederates, to near anarchy as the steady breakdown of the law became more commonplace.
This is an overall realistic book bringing into focas an aspect of real life... this is an excellent book for your Civil War library... a fascinating read.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Cautionary Tale for Today
Comment: Any fan of the History Channel's Civil War documentaries will be familiar with Dr. Davis' commentary abilities on the military aspects of the Civil War. In this book, he turns his attention to the political aspects of the Confederate movement. While he is not the classic storyteller in the style of Shelby Foote, Davis' writing style is nonetheless engaging and dead on for the topic covered.
This is the first book I have read on the Civil War that accurately pegs the cause of the war. It was not slavery, most northerners did not care about it one way or the other, and it wasn't state's rights, most southerners didn't care either way. It was about the belief that one group has the inherent right to rule another group by virtue of their circumstances. What I found most interesting about the book was the parallels that we see between the confederate oligarchs of the nineteenth century and the protagonists of many movements we see in the twenty-first century. The Rhett's, Yancey's, and Toombs' of the 1860's had nothing on the Kerry's, the Kennedy's, and the Clinton's of today. They all believe that they are obligated and entitled, by birth or circumstance, to control the lives of others.
Look Away serves as a cautionary tale for those who seek radical change. In it, the trap of every radical movement lies exposed wherein in order to attain and maintain their power, they must sacrifice their ideals. Like modern "progressives", they only saw the immediate satisfaction of their desires and never saw the long term or unintended affects of their actions. It is amazing that a people who took the radical step of severing their ties to the Union in order to maintain their rights, almost immediately saw those rights infringed or abolished by the government they had formed. Today a group who speaks loftily of freedom of choice seeks at every turn to restrict that freedom, be it of speech or property rights, for the "public good".
This book should be required reading in every high school government class.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not quite as advertised
Comment: This attempt at a political/social history of the Confederacy has a problem of focus. Davis read a lot of letters and newspapers in the course of his research and he has the unfortunate desire to quote from most of them. The result is that, for the most part, we get a sense of the leaves in the forest that was the Confederacy without much of a sense of the larger movements. Thus, for instance, Davis concentrates on individuals who opposed Jefferson Davis for various reasons and on various issues but we never get a sense that this opposition was anything but atomistic. Likewise he leaves it largerly to his readers to make sense of the inherent conflict between a nation created on the premise of state's rights and the individual states. His recounting of the social history of the period mostly concentrates on specific challenges to civil order that arose in the South. No doubt the larger issues of morale and adherence to the cause of the South would have been harder to document and substantiate and yet by only recounting individual events one has no sense of whether Davis thinks the South had a civilian morale problem, did not have a problem, had a problem in some places but not others, at certain times and not others, among some sectors of the population and not others. In short too many details rather than illuminating are confusing.
Davis' summary of the military part of the history the Civil War is outstanding and stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the book. It is too bad that he could not have figured out how to provide a similar level of focus to the political history.
Davis' examples are nearly all from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, South & North Carolina, Florida & Texas. It is not clear why he did not use Virginia or border states materials and given his atomistic approach this oversight is more noticeable.
To give Davis his due, he does make general statements about the political movements within the Confederacy; the problem is that he does not know how to bridge the gap between the specific minutia of history and its largest themes. Still he gets 3 stars based on his conveying a lot of information that I have not encountered previously (and that very good summary of the military action already mentioned.)
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Title: An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government by William C. Davis ISBN: 0151005648 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 04 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: "A Government of Our Own": The Making of the Confederacy by William C. Davis ISBN: 0029077354 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1994 List Price(USD): $30.95 |
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Title: The South Was Right! by James Ronald Kennedy, Walter Donald Kennedy ISBN: 1565540247 Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock by Francis Augustin O'Reilly ISBN: 0807128090 Publisher: Louisiana State University Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Lone Star Rising: The Revolutionary Birth of the Texas Republic by William C. Davis ISBN: 0684865106 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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