Exploring the creation, maintenance, and transformation of Confederate identity during the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rubin sheds new light on the ways in which Confederates felt connected to their national creation and provides a provocative example of what happens when a nation disintegrates and leaves its people behind to forge a new identity.

Anne Sarah Rubin is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is coauthor, with Edward Ayers, of the electronic project Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War: The Eve of War.