For more than sixty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America's greatest struggle. Civil War History Readers reintroduce the most influential articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy and tactics, to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women's issues, as well as the war's causes, its aftermath, and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published fresh and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of America's "middle period."

In this fourth volume of the series, editor J. Matthew Gallman includes sixteen pioneering essays by Daniel E. Sutherland , Gary Gallagher, James Marten, Alice Fahs, and other scholars that examine the Civil War home front. Topics include voluntarism; science and medicine; communities at war; recruitment and conscription; welfare, dissent, and nationalism; and literature and society. Gallman's introduction assesses the significance of each article in providing a clearer understanding of the era.