Laura R. Sandy is a lecturer in American history at the University of Liverpool and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery.Marie S. Molloy is a Lecturer in American History at Manchester Metropolitan University.

• Introduction: Negotiating the Peripheries Part I: Negotiating Perceptions of Slavery, Civil War and the Confederacy 1. The Republic on Trial or Slavery Under Fire?: International Perspectives on the Nature of America’s Civil War 2. Britain in the American Civil War: Gender, Humanitarianism and Confederate Recognition (1861-65) 3. Whose Hearth and Home?: White Civil War-Era Loyalties in Central Louisiana Part II: A Stable Society?: Transgressive Behaviors and Lives on the Peripheries 4. "Negro Thieves" and Abolitionists: Slave Stealing in Kentucky in the Civil War Era 5. Class, Color and Conflict: Separation and Divorce in Southern White Marriage in the Civil War Era 6. Fashioning Whiteness: Teaching the Ways That Slavery Defined Race Before and After the Civil War Part III: African-American Experiences of Emancipation and Freedom Reconsidered 7. "The Contraband’s Death Is More Miserable Than Her Life": Violence, Visibility, and the Medicalization of Freedom in the American Civil War 8. Emancipation in the Dock: The Problems of Freedom in the Reconstruction Courtroom 9. "Let Us Begin Life Anew, and Learn to Live in Earnest!": Free Black Women and the Challenges of Freedom in the Civil War Era

"All of the papers cover topics more or less neglected, often deliberately, by earlier scholars... This is an excellent read for those interested in American social history, slavery, or the Civil War."- The NYMAS Review