@book{lee_2014, title={Claiming the Union}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139058421}, DOI={10.1017/cbo9781139058421}, abstractNote={This book examines Southerners' claims to loyal citizenship in the reunited nation after the American Civil War. Southerners - male and female; elite and non-elite; white, black, and American Indian - disagreed with the federal government over the obligations citizens owed to their nation and the obligations the nation owed to its citizens. Susanna Michele Lee explores these clashes through the operations of the Southern Claims Commission, a federal body that rewarded compensation for wartime losses to Southerners who proved that they had been loyal citizens of the Union. Lee argues that Southerners forced the federal government to consider how white men who had not been soldiers and voters, and women and racial minorities who had not been allowed to serve in those capacities, could also qualify as loyal citizens. Postwar considerations of the former Confederacy potentially demanded a reconceptualization of citizenship that replaced exclusions by race and gender with inclusions according to loyalty.}, note={publisher = Cambridge University Press, author = Susanna Michele Lee, title = Claiming the Union}, journal={Cambridge University Press}, publisher={New York: Cambridge University Press}, author={Lee, Susanna}, year={2014}, month={Apr} }
 @article{lee_2012, title={Mississippi in the Civil War: The home front}, volume={58}, DOI={10.1353/cwh.2012.0017}, abstractNote={Reviewed by: Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front Susanna Michele Lee Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front. Timothy B. Smith. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60473-429-4, 260 pp., cloth, $40.00. Timothy B. Smith's Mississippi in the Civil War focuses on the state's home front. Smith imagines the story of the Mississippi home front as a wagon wheel. The secession convention occupied the center hub of the wheel, its spokes comprised the major areas of state function, and its outer rim represented the common people of the state. Smith primarily positions his work vis-à-vis Percy L. Rainwater's Mississippi: Storm Center of Secession, 1856-1861 and John K. Bettersworth's Confederate Mississippi: The People and Policies of a Cotton State in Wartime. These books, published in 1938 and 1943, neglect significant topics now considered standard in any home-front study, including the experiences of women, blacks, and Unionists. Smith intends his work to serve as a complement to these earlier works, filling the gaps in the story of the Mississippi home front. He offers a "dual paradigm," arguing that defeat in Mississippi emerged from both military conquest by the Union army and a loss of will on the home front, without expressly prioritizing one over the other (3). In doing so, he sees both external and internal factors at work and, in this way, avoids becoming mired in this historiographical debate. In the first part of his book, Smith explores the state during the secession crisis and subsequent war, the hub and the spokes of the Mississippi home front. Chapter 1 provides a brief treatment of secession, touching upon the proceedings of the convention itself and emphasizing the role of slavery in motivating secessionists. Chapter 2 covers the political system, proceeding from legislative session to legislative session and examining a shift from partial to complete mobilization. Chapter 3 focuses on the enlistment of soldiers for the Confederate war effort, detailing the different units formed in the state and describing the effect of their deaths and injuries on morale. Chapter 4 addresses the destruction of [End Page 283] the state's infrastructure, identifying both Union and Confederate forces as the culprits. Chapter 5, the strongest chapter of the book's first half, examines the state's economy, demonstrating the devastation that occupation, speculation, inflation, and taxation wrought upon the Mississippi home front. The first part of the book concentrates almost entirely on the political elite, specifically the governor and the state legislators. Smith's main point in each of his chapters here is that each aspect of the state—its political system, military power, infrastructure, and economic policy—fell apart. Smith particularly identifies the Union invasions of 1863 rather than the twin defeats of Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863 as the turning point of the war in Mississippi. In the book's second part, Smith addresses various segments of the civilian population, the outer ring of the Mississippi home front. Chapters 6 through 9 target Confederate men, dissenters (including white unionists, disaffected Confederates, and anti-Confederates), slaves, and women and children. Readers should integrate the discussion of these groups with Smith's treatment of the political system, military mobilization, material devastation, and economic problems in the earlier chapters for a full portrait of the Mississippi home front. The chapter on slaves is the most state-centered, especially in its attention to Union and Confederate policies concerning the institution. The structure of the book does lead to some overlap in coverage; for instance, readers interested in the experiences and perspectives of disaffected Confederates should also consult the chapter on Confederates. Those concerned with women should also check the chapter on Confederate men and slaves. Smith concludes his book with a chapter on the state's religious, educational, and literary efforts. Smith's contention in the chapters in the second half of his book is that each group either gradually lost the will to fight, as in the case of Confederates and disaffected Confederates, or lacked the will to fight, as in the case of white and black Unionists and anti-Confederates; thus, they collectively contributed to Confederate defeat. In...}, number={2}, journal={Civil War History}, author={Lee, Susanna}, year={2012}, pages={283–284} }
 @misc{lee_2011, title={LOCATING THE SOUTH DURING THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION}, volume={39}, ISSN={["1080-6628"]}, DOI={10.1353/rah.2011.0053}, abstractNote={Locating the South During the Civil War and Reconstruction Susanna Michele Lee (bio) Richard R. Duncan . Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. xix + 380 pp. Illustrations, selected biographical sketches, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00. Jacqueline Jones . Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008. x + 510 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, selected bibliography, index. $30.00. Paul D. Escott , ed. North Carolinians in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. vii + 307 pp. Tables, notes, list of contributors, index. $52.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper). Since the 1980s, historians of the American South have increasingly turned to local studies to illuminate homefront experience during the Civil War. Historians have written monographs on urban areas like Richmond, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Charleston, as well as rural communities scattered throughout the Confederacy. Many of these studies extend their coverage to the postwar battles of Reconstruction. Local studies on the Southern homefront generally address questions of class, race, or gender conflict; patriotism and dissent; community structure and destruction; and military-civilian relations. Amateur historians who write local histories of the Civil War homefront provide valuable building blocks for other historians, but their works are often dismissed as simplistic in interpretation and anecdotal in approach. While some historians celebrate the singularization of the historical experience, most authors of local histories, community studies, and microhistories attempt to address big questions in small places. To examine trends in interpretation and approach in local studies of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, this essay explores three recently published books—two monographs and one edited collection. The first histories of the Southern homefront adopted the Confederate perspective. In the aftermath of the Civil War, former Confederates promoted [End Page 107] a celebratory narrative. Southerners had waged war in defense of the constitutional principle of states' rights. Even slaves had supported the Southern cause, they claimed, siding with their beloved masters against marauding Yankee soldiers. Proponents of the so-called Lost Cause dismissed the role of slavery in the creation of the Confederacy and the significance of the institution in its demise. By the turn of the century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other organizations had successfully established a Confederate version of the War between the States as the true history of the Civil War. Historians seeking to move beyond the perspective of Confederates in their studies of the Civil War homefront face intractable challenges. The war and postwar South bequeathed to historians a particularly compromised historical record. Unconditional Southern Unionists were often marginal figures who left relatively few letters, diaries, and memoirs of their wartime experiences. This is particularly the case with slaves who were legally prohibited from learning to read and write. Historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction turn to local studies in order to reveal the everyday experiences of elites and non-elites, including Unionists, which had been obscured by pro-Confederate histories. Local histories, especially monographs, offer the tantalizing but elusive prospect of interpretive authority by focusing on small topics—places, people, or events. One approach encourages the exhaustive exploration of a finite set of primary sources so that, as historian Richard D. Brown suggests, "the microhistorian commands the evidence on that subject beyond challenge; so within that topic readers learn to accept her or his authority. . . . Their assertions, grounded as they are in a profound, multi-faceted, even holistic, grasp of a fragment of historical experience, cannot be dismissed easily as fictions." Giovanni Levi, an eminent microhistorian, suggests an alternative approach "of incorporating into the main body of the narrative the procedures of research itself, the documentary limitations, techniques of persuasion and interpretive constructions. This method clearly breaks with the traditional assertive, authoritarian form of discourse adopted by historians who present reality as objective."1 Both Brown's and Levi's approaches represent reactions against the realization of the fragmentary and partial nature of the historical record. The two monographs under consideration attempt to resolve the shortcomings of the historical record in different ways. Richard R. Duncan's book shares more in common with the first...}, number={1}, journal={REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY}, author={Lee, Susanna Michele}, year={2011}, month={Mar}, pages={107–117} }
 @misc{lee_2009, title={Voices of emancipation: Understanding slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction through the US pension bureau files}, volume={75}, number={4}, journal={Journal of Southern History}, author={Lee, S. M.}, year={2009}, pages={1078–1079} }