Presented by Dr. Stephanie McCurry
In her new book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, Dr. Stephanie McCurry presents a re-examination of the Confederacy for which wartime scarcity of food, labor and slaves, created stresses and crises which rivaled those on the battlefields. McCurry makes the case that while Southern statesmen and leaders had created a powerful system based on slavery, in excluding the majority of the Southern population-white women and slaves-they had doomed their enterprise to failure. She argues that the disenfranchised applied pressure as they contested government enlistment, tax policies and fought for their freedom and ultimately played a decisive role in deciding the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
Stephanie McCurry is a specialist in Nineteenth Century American history, with a focus on the American South and the Civil War era, and the history of women and gender.
