At the end of the Civil War, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman was surprisingly more popular in the newly defeated South than he was in the North. Yet, only thirty years later, his name was synonymous with evil and destruction in the South, particularly as the creator and enactor of the “total war” policy. In Demon of the Lost Cause, Wesley Moody examines these perplexing contradictions and how they and others function in past and present myths about Sherman. Throughout this fascinating study of Sherman’s reputation, from his first public servant role as the major general for the state of California until his death in 1891, Moody explores why Sherman remains one of the most controversial figures in American history. Using contemporary newspaper accounts, Sherman’s letters and memoirs, as well as biographies of Sherman and histories of his times, Moody reveals that Sherman’s shifting reputation was formed by whoever controlled the message, whether it was the Lost Cause historians of the South, Sherman’s enemies in the North, or Sherman himself. With his famous “March to the Sea” in Georgia, the general became known for inventing a brutal warfare where the conflict is brought to the civilian population. In fact, many of Sherman’s actions were official tactics to be employed when dealing with guerrilla forces, yet Sherman never put an end to the talk of his innovative tactics and even added to the stories himself. Sherman knew he had enemies in the Union army and within the Republican elite who could and would jeopardize his position for their own gain. In fact, these were the same people who spread the word that Sherman was a Southern sympathizer following the war, helping to place the general in the South’s good graces. That all changed, however, when the Lost Cause historians began formulating revisions to the Civil War, as Sherman’s actions were the perfect explanation for why the South had lost. Demon of the Lost Cause reveals the machinations behind the Sherman myth and the reasons behind the acceptance of such myths, no matter who invented them. In the case of Sherman’s own mythmaking, Moody postulates that his motivation was to secure a military position to support his wife and children. For the other Sherman mythmakers, personal or political gain was typically the rationale behind the stories they told and believed. In tracing Sherman’s ever-changing reputation, Moody sheds light on current and past understanding of the Civil War through the lens of one of its most controversial figures.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: The Prewar Years and the Early War -- Chapter 2: The Atlanta Campaign and the March to the Sea -- Chapter 3: The Commanding General versus the North -- Chapter 4: The War of the Memoirs -- Chapter 5: Sherman's Last Years -- Chapter 6: Sherman versus the Lost Cause -- Chapter 7: Embracing the Lost Cause -- Chapter 8: Sherman in Film -- Chapter 9: Sherman and the Modern Historians -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Humanity finally has a hero who can stand up to Hell. It's my job to stop her. Guess that makes me the villain. Ever since Heaven lost the war, the forces of Hell have treated my city as their playground. One human is finally pushing back. With the power of a saint's relic behind her, she's bringing light to Jarvis's dark streets, one dead demon at a time. But not every demon is one of the bad guys. Some of us just want to live our lives in peace. And if I don't stand up for the ones who can't defend themselves... well, who else is going to care what happens to a bunch of monsters? I wish I'd never asked. Because now none other than Vekaniel is sitting in my office, offering to join forces to protect the good demons of the city. Yep, that's right: the scary-powerful fallen angel. My former ally in the war against Heaven. The one I went up against a few months back, and barely came out alive. She swears she's on the straight and narrow now. We'll see about that. But the fact is, I can't win this alone. I need help. The kind only a dangerous, devious, and maybe-reformed fallen angel can give.

In the late 1800s, Southern evangelicals believed contemporary troubles—everything from poverty to political corruption to violence between African Americans and whites—sprang from the bottles of “demon rum” regularly consumed in the South. Though temperance quickly gained support in the antebellum North, Southerners cast a skeptical eye on the movement, because of its ties with antislavery efforts. Postwar evangelicals quickly realized they had to make temperance appealing to the South by transforming the Yankee moral reform movement into something compatible with southern values and culture. In Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement, Joe L. Coker examines the tactics and results of temperance reformers between 1880 and 1915. Though their denominations traditionally forbade the preaching of politics from the pulpit, an outgrowth of evangelical fervor led ministers and their congregations to sound the call for prohibition. Determined to save the South from the evils of alcohol, they played on southern cultural attitudes about politics, race, women, and honor to communicate their message. The evangelicals were successful in their approach, negotiating such political obstacles as public disapproval the church’s role in politics and vehement opposition to prohibition voiced by Jefferson Davis. The evangelical community successfully convinced the public that cheap liquor in the hands of African American “beasts” and drunkard husbands posed a serious threat to white women. Eventually, the code of honor that depended upon alcohol-centered hospitality and camaraderie was redefined to favor those who lived as Christians and supported the prohibition movement. Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause is the first comprehensive survey of temperance in the South. By tailoring the prohibition message to the unique context of the American South, southern evangelicals transformed the region into a hotbed of temperance activity, leading the national prohibition movement.

In this brilliant study of the relationship between rhetoric and geometry, David Metzger boldly poses and answers questions of major significance to the field of rhetorical studies. By asking what rhetoric is, he examines why it has always been difficult to define and to determine its purpose and value. Metzger seeks to ascertain how rhetoric can be more clearly valued and therefore better understood, both on its own and as a set of tools with which to write and think. Metzger explores the nature of knowledge in terms of what is created in the relationship between rhetoric and geometry, noting how rhetoric is eliminated in the epistemology of Western culture and how it can he replaced through geometry in the places vacated by philosophy. He argues that the dismissal of the "here and now" (and thus the dismissal of rhetoric itself) takes the form of two basic philosophical moves: the onomastic, which dismisses rhetoric because it is not philosophic, not geometry, and the genealogical, which dismisses rhetoric because it is philosophic, not geometry. Using Descartes s "cogito "and Derrida s discussion of genre as examples of these two philosophical moves, Metzger introduces the work of Aristotle and Lacan as their counter-examples. He then argues that rhetoric is about the present. For Aristotle, rhetoric is a "dunamis, "a faculty and potentiality, but not a potentiality with reference to the future. For Lacan, rhetoric is a means of delineating, through the laws of metaphor and metonymy, the instance of the letter, the instant(s) or "nowness" of the unconscious understood as a "zeitloss, "a tireless worker. For both Aristotle and Lacan, the formal properties of rhetoric appear in rhetoric s relation to geometry. Metzger points out that contemporary researchers in rhetoric often assume a definition of rhetoric for the purpose of classification; distinguishing, for instance, among a medieval rhetoric, a feminist rhetoric, or a phenomenological rhetoric. This kind of research, he believes, examines rhetoric in terms of what it was or might be, but not in terms of what it actually is. As the first postmodern discussion of the relation of rhetoric and time, Metzger s book examines rhetoric as it is, breaking new ground as a study of Aristotle s notion of faculty ("dunamis), "of Lacanian rhetoric, and of the relation of rhetoric and geometry as it does so. It is a book for all theorists (particularly poststructuralist theorists and others eager to know more about Lacan), Lacanians who have ignored Lacan s relevance to rhetoric, and historians critical of the division, in modern rhetorical studies, between theory and history."

The New Deal era witnessed a surprising surge in popular engagement with the history and memory of the Civil War era. From the omnipresent book and film Gone with the Wind and the scores of popular theater productions to Aaron Copeland's "A Lincoln Portrait," it was hard to miss America's fascination with the war in the 1930s and 1940s. Nina Silber deftly examines the often conflicting and politically contentious ways in which Americans remembered the Civil War era during the years of the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. In doing so, she reveals how the debates and events of that earlier period resonated so profoundly with New Deal rhetoric about state power, emerging civil rights activism, labor organizing and trade unionism, and popular culture in wartime. At the heart of this book is an examination of how historical memory offers people a means of understanding and defining themselves in the present. Silber reveals how, during a moment of enormous national turmoil, the events and personages of the Civil War provided a framework for reassessing national identity, class conflict, and racial and ethnic division. The New Deal era may have been the first time Civil War memory loomed so large for the nation as a whole, but, as the present moment suggests, it was hardly the last.