A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 2: The Conflicted Ozarks focuses on the long era of Civil War and Reconstruction, stretching roughly from the 1850s through the 1880s. The book begins with an analysis of slavery (the most thorough examination of the institution in the region to date) and the secession crisis. Almost half the book deals with the four years of civil warfare, including a summary of the formal, battlefield war in the Ozarks and an examination of various facets of the home front, from guerrilla fighters to the role of women. It also features the most comprehensive portrait of the long ... More

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 2: The Conflicted Ozarks focuses on the long era of Civil War and Reconstruction, stretching roughly from the 1850s through the 1880s. The book begins with an analysis of slavery (the most thorough examination of the institution in the region to date) and the secession crisis. Almost half the book deals with the four years of civil warfare, including a summary of the formal, battlefield war in the Ozarks and an examination of various facets of the home front, from guerrilla fighters to the role of women. It also features the most comprehensive portrait of the long Reconstruction era in the Ozarks, including a comparison of political Reconstruction in Arkansas and Missouri as well as an extended treatment of social and economic reconstruction that chronicles railroad building, manufacturing, extractive industry, and the development of educational institutions in the postwar years. In addition to the continuation of volume 1’s argument that the story of the Ozarks is mostly an unexceptional, regional variation of the American story, volume 2 is built on the thematic concept of multiple layers of conflict in the region--divisions over slavery, wartime violence and its stubborn continuation in the Reconstruction era, and the continuing conflicted identity of the Ozarks as part southern and part midwestern, part Union and part Confederate, part modern and part backwoods.