Edward L. Ayers
What Caused the Civil War?
Reflections on the South and Southern History
“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe
Foremost among Southern historians today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War: the Valley of the Shadow. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation’s and his own history. In the title essay, original here, he distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation’s central historical event. Avoiding the overdetermined view of the Civil War as an inevitable clash of competing civilizations, Ayers restores to history its drama, its open-ended possibilities. In his essay on Reconstruction, the federal attempts to reconstruct the South become precursors to later such efforts sponsored by the United States around the world, with implications for our own time.
Edward L. Ayers is the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History and dean at the University of Virginia. His most recent book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, won the Bancroft Prize in 2004. He lives in Charlottesville.
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Also available:
In the Presence of Mine Enemies
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