2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. There have been a spate of new books commemorating the occasion, and one of the best is The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It. Library Journal wrote "[d]rawing on diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper reports and editorials, memoirs, songs, poems, and other sources, the editors bring together a rich variety of voices relating or remembering the crisis of the Union from Lincoln's election in 1860 through the first year of war. Running through these accounts is white Southerners' certainty in the right of secession and their right to undertake war to defend slavery's interest and white man's liberty, as is the certainty of Northerners in the right and necessity of saving the Union by whatever means to continue the great experiment in self-government. At the same time, confusion and doubt reign as contemporaries worry about how to achieve their ends and whom to trust to do so. Readable and riveting."