Discarding tidy abstractions about the conduct of war, Aaron Sheehan-Dean shows that the notoriously bloody US Civil War could have been much worse. Despite agonizing debates over Just War and careful differentiation among victims, Americans could not avoid living with the contradictions inherent in a conflict that was both violent and restrained.

Discarding tidy abstractions about the conduct of war, Aaron Sheehan-Dean shows that the notoriously bloody US Civil War could have been much worse. Despite agonizing debates over Just War and careful differentiation among victims, Americans could not avoid living with the contradictions inherent in a conflict that was both violent and restrained.

Discarding tidy abstractions about the conduct of war, Aaron Sheehan-Dean shows that the notoriously bloody US Civil War could have been much worse. Despite agonizing debates over Just War and careful differentiation among victims, Americans could not avoid living with the contradictions inherent in a conflict that was both violent and restrained.--

Donald L. Horowitz's comprehensive consideration of the structure and dynamics of ethnic violence is the first full-scale, comparative study of what the author terms the deadly ethnic riot—an intense, sudden, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group. Serious, frequent, and destabilizing, these events result in large numbers of casualties. Horowitz examines approximately 150 such riots in about fifty countries, mainly in Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, as well as fifty control cases. With its deep and thorough scholarship, incisive analysis, and profound insights, The Deadly Ethnic Riot will become the definitive work on its subject. Furious and sadistic, the riot is nevertheless directed against a precisely specified class of targets and conducted with considerable circumspection. Horowitz scrutinizes target choices, participants and organization, the timing and supporting conditions for the violence, the nature of the events that precede the riot, the prevalence of atrocities during the violence, the location and diffusion of riots, and the aims and effects of riot behavior. He finds that the deadly ethnic riot is a highly patterned but emotional event that tends to occur during times of political uncertainty. He also discusses the crucial role of rumor in triggering riots, the surprisingly limited role of deliberate organization, and the striking lack of remorse exhibited by participants. Horowitz writes clearly and eloquently without compromising the complexity of his subject. With impressive analytical skill, he takes up the important challenge of explaining phenomena that are at once passionate and calculative.

For men in the Union and Confederate armies and their families at home, letter writing was the sole means to communicate. Taking pen to paper was a new and daunting task, but Christopher Hager shows how ordinary people made writing their own, and how they in turn transformed the culture of letters into a popular, democratic mode of communication.

After the Civil War's end, reports surged of violence by Southern whites against Union troops and Black men, women, and children. While some in Washington, D.C., sought to downplay the growing evidence of atrocities, in September 1866, Freedmen's Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard requested that assistant commissioners in the readmitted states compile reports of "murders and outrages" to catalog the extent of violence, to prove that the reports of a peaceful South were wrong, and to argue in Congress for the necessity of martial law. What ensued was one of the most fascinating and least understood fights of the Reconstruction era—a political and analytical fight over information and its validity, with implications that dealt in life and death. Here William A. Blair takes the full measure of the bureau's attempt to document and deploy hard information about the reality of the violence that Black communities endured in the wake of Emancipation. Blair uses the accounts of far-flung Freedmen's Bureau agents to ask questions about the early days of Reconstruction, which are surprisingly resonant with the present day: How do you prove something happened in a highly partisan atmosphere where the credibility of information is constantly challenged? And what form should that information take to be considered as fact?