The Confederate Experience Reader provides students and professors with the essential materials needed to understand and appreciate the major issues confronting the Southern Republic's brief existence during the American Civil War. This anthology covers the full history of the Confederate experience including the origins of the antebellum South, the rise of southern nationalism, the 1860 election and the subsequent Secession Crisis, the military conflict, and Reconstruction. Drawing from a full range of primary writings that describe the experience of living in the Southern Republic in vivid detail, as well as a careful selection of secondary works by prominent scholars in the field of confederate history, The Confederate Experience Reader allows students to situate the Confederate experience within the larger context of Southern and American history.