Booknotes: Confederate Cities

New Arrival:
• Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era edited by Andrew W. Slap and Frank Towers (Univ of Chicago Pr, 2015).

Confederate Cities takes readers away from the well worn paths of the plantation and small farm southern economies to the urban scene. It "shifts the focus from the agrarian economy that undergirded the South to the cities that served as its political and administrative hubs. The contributors use the lens of the city to examine now-familiar Civil War–era themes, including the scope of the war, secession, gender, emancipation, and war’s destruction." The eleven essays (plus an introduction and conclusion by the volume editors) employ a great variety of thematic approaches to the subject. You can peruse the table of contents available through the title link.