Category Archives: American History

“I’m Your Huckleberry”: Doc Holliday, the Fragile Gunman, and What America Asks of Its Violence

Posted on June 27, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract In George P. Cosmatos’s Tombstone (1993), the nominal hero is Wyatt Earp, the lawman who restores order to a lawless silver town. Yet the character who has lodged most durably in the American imagination is not the lawman but … Continue reading →

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Prolegomenon III — On the Understudied Institutions of Union and Confederacy

Posted on June 17, 2026 by nathanalbright

Part I. The Problem Stated: Where the Attention Has Gone The second prolegomenon ended by pointing past the proclamations and the speeches to the place where the test of an order’s strength was actually passed and failed—the concrete working of … Continue reading →

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Prolegomenon II — On Civil War as the Ultimate Test of Institutions, and the Leader’s Burden of Sustaining a Cause

Posted on June 17, 2026 by nathanalbright

Part I. The Problem Stated: When the Cushions Are Removed The first prolegomenon ended by pointing beneath the surface of the war—beneath the campaigns and the commanders that have drawn the most attention—to the conditions that decided what the surface … Continue reading →

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Prolegomenon I — On the Inexhaustibility of a Familiar Subject

Posted on June 17, 2026 by nathanalbright

Part I. The Problem Stated: The Paradox of the Crowded Shelf Stand before any well-stocked shelf of American history and the Civil War will announce itself by sheer mass. The titles run to the thousands and then the tens of … Continue reading →

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The Memoir Problem and the Postwar Record: Source Criticism and the Lost Cause in the Study of Davis and His Generals

Posted on June 16, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The eight case studies in this volume have repeatedly anchored their conclusions in a single methodological commitment: that contemporary correspondence must be privileged over the self-justifying memoirs of the principals, and that the later Lost Cause historiography must be … Continue reading →

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Structure Over Personality: Jefferson Davis, the Department System, and the Western Command Problem

Posted on June 16, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The case studies assembled in this volume have proceeded dyad by dyad, treating each relationship between Jefferson Davis and a general as the unit of analysis. This paper deliberately reverses that lens. It asks whether the recurring Confederate failures … Continue reading →

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The Fateful Elevation: Jefferson Davis, John Bell Hood, and the Destruction of the Army of Tennessee

Posted on June 16, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The decision to replace Joseph E. Johnston with John Bell Hood before Atlanta in July 1864, and the catastrophe that followed in Tennessee that winter, together constitute the most consequential single command decision Jefferson Davis made in the Western … Continue reading →

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The Favorites: Jefferson Davis, Albert Sidney Johnston, Leonidas Polk, and the Patronage of Friendship

Posted on June 16, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The preceding studies examined relationships that failed through distrust, that were sustained too long through loyalty, or that were poisoned by wounded vanity. This paper turns to the obverse: the generals whom Jefferson Davis favored from the outset on … Continue reading →

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The Creole Estrangement: Jefferson Davis, P. G. T. Beauregard, and the Cost of Wounded Vanity

Posted on June 15, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The relationship between Jefferson Davis and P. G. T. Beauregard differs from the two Western dyads examined in the preceding studies in both its origin and its trajectory. It began not in a dispute over rank or in doubts … Continue reading →

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Loyalty Against the Grain: Jefferson Davis, Braxton Bragg, and the Limits of Executive Support

Posted on June 15, 2026 by nathanalbright

Abstract The relationship between Jefferson Davis and Braxton Bragg presents the inverse of the Davis–Johnston dysfunction examined in the preceding study. Where Davis withheld trust from a capable general he disliked, he extended sustained support to a general whose capacity … Continue reading →

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