Book Reviews
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BALLARD: Grant at Vicksburg (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/19/2013
Grant at Vicksburg is much more than a biography or campaign study. The depth of Michael Ballard's research into Grant's correspondence and routine make it a study in command, control, communications, and intelligence (what Grant knew and when he knew it)...
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DAVIS: What the Yankees Did to Us (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/12/2013
General William Tecumseh Sherman was a very bad man. This is the main point of Stephen Davis' exhaustive history of the Union capture of Atlanta in 1864...
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KELMAN: A Misplaced Massacre (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/5/2013
Kelman deserves praise for bringing it to our attention at this moment, lest we forget that many Native Americans gave the last full measure of devotion to their own nations in the midst of the American Civil War...
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FINCK: Divided Loyalties (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/29/2013
This volume will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in how and why Kentucky navigated such a singular political and military course during the first year of the Civil War...
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JORDAN: Unholy Sabbath (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/29/2013
This newly crafted view of South Mountain and how veterans have chosen to remember - or in the case of many Confederates forget this battle - restores the men who fought there to a prominent place in memory...
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ROBINS (ed.): They Have Left Us Here To Die (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/29/2013
In They Have Left Us Here to Die, Robins uses Sgt. Adair's experience as a lens to investigate the broader framework of the Confederate prison camp network during the last year of the war...
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HASEGAWA: Mending Broken Soldiers (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/22/2013
In his newest study, Guy Hasegawa examines efforts on behalf of the Union and Confederacy to supply prosthetic limbs during the Civil War...
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BERGERON: Andrew Johnson's Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/22/2013
While not denying Johnson's more sinister traits, Bergeron contends that historians need to evaluate the man and his career through other lenses in addition to those centering upon his racism and stubbornness...
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AYERS & MARTIN (eds.): America on the Eve of the Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/22/2013
America on the Eve of the Civil War is a fairly quick read and one that is good for both the general public and trained historians. The depth of information about Richmond compliments the breadth available on national concerns in the 1850s, which allows the book to seem broad and specific at the same time...
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GUELZO: Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/15/2013
With the appearance of Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, Allen Guelzo takes his place among the very elite chroniclers of the Civil War's most enduring military drama. Can anyone win a third Lincoln Prize?...
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GALLAGHER: Becoming Confederates (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/8/2013
With Becoming Confederates, Gallagher presents a more nuanced approach for understanding what drove individual behavior... [and] proposes a template for assessing the behavior of the Civil War participants, both military and civilian...
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OAKES: Freedom National (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/1/2013
When an eminent nineteenth-century historian tackles this topic we must pay attention, especially when he promises radically new interpretations. Oakes indeed argues much that challenges previous historiography, although not always successfully...
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GOURLEY: Diverging Loyalties (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/24/2013
Bruce T. Gourley's Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the Civil War is an engrossing, enlightening exploration of our nation?s greatest trauma, as seen through the eyes of a unique source: that is, the Baptist community of one southern state...
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TEWELL: A Self-Evident Lie (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/17/2013
Ironically, the falsehood discussed in Jeremy J. Tewell's important study, A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom would not be considered a lie today...
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ERWIN: Guerrillas in Civil War Missouri (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/10/2013
While this book is not a work of professional history per se, it provides a well-organized, concise, and synthetic overview of the guerrilla war in Missouri that serves as a helpful guide through the history of the conflict for those who are not well-versed in the existing literature...
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QUARSTEIN: The CSS Virginia (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/3/2013
This most complete study of the CSS Virginia is a welcome addition to any bookshelf and complements a similar work done by the author on the USS Monitor.
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SCOTT & HEBRARD: Freedom Papers (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/27/2013
Readers who embark on the Atlantic Odyssey with the Tinchants (and the authors) will agree that it is a memorable journey well worth the taking...
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DIRCK: Abraham Lincoln and White America (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/20/2013
Abraham Lincoln and White America offers new insights without the jargon and theoretical huffing and puffing that often accompany such works. Here is a fine Lincoln scholar at the top of his game, and the result is a stimulating book that will be of great value to scholars and students alike...
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LUBET: John Brown's Spy (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/20/2013
Lubet's work will no doubt fascinate Civil War buffs and historians alike and contribute a much-needed work of legal history to a crowded Civil War Era historiography. The courtroom drama is an excellent one...
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DAVIS (ed.): Bully for the Band! (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/13/2013
Although Bully for the Band does not tread any new interpretative ground, it is a nice addition to the voluminous collection of published primary sources from the Civil War era...
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BOMAN: Lincoln and Citizens' Rights in Civil War Missouri (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/6/2013
As a wartime president tasked with holding together a country ripping at the seams, Abraham Lincoln sought and utilized every means of maintaining the Union... Boman argues for Lincoln's overall success as a moderator and "reluctant warrior," as he led the troubled state back to civilian and local control...
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SIMPSON, SEARS, SHEEHAN-DEAN (eds.): The Civil War: The First Year (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/27/2013
With the first of a four-volume series chronicling the Civil War from The Library of America, editors Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean have expertly selected, arranged, and introduced primary documents in a way that allows students to experience the "deep contingencies" of the war's opening year...
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CODDINGTON: African American Faces of the Civil War (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/27/2013
Coddington's African American Faces of the Civil War is a fascinating work that captures the soldiers at a moment when they proudly served a country that was only just then beginning to reassess their citizenship rights...
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MOAT: Killing Lincoln (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/20/2013
The music is ominous. The man climbs up the stairs. He pauses outside a door, puts on a hat, and runs his finger across the brim. He opens the door, presses his back against the wall, raises a gun and levels it at the head of a president...
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LAFANTASIE (ed.): The Union Forever (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/20/2013
The essays in The Union Forever provide ample evidence that in addition to being a great editor, Simon also produced some very perceptive pieces on Abraham Lincoln, Grant, and their partnership during the war...
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WILLIAMS: My Old Confederate Home (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/13/2013
Freelance writer and amateur historian Rusty Williams's study augments the works of R. B. Rosenburg, Jeffrey McClurken, and Patrick Kelly, by tracing the institutional life of a single veterans? institution, the Kentucky Confederate Home...
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DESJARDIN (ed.): Joshua L. Chamberlain: The Life in Letters (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/6/2013
This collection of documents relating to the life and career of famed Union general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is both richly rewarding as well as enormously disappointing...
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MASUR: Lincoln's Hundred Days (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/30/2013
In Louis Masur's excellent new book, the Emancipation Proclamation may have been grittily won in a dirty privy, but it accomplished nothing less than the "melioration of our planet."
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FOOTE: The Gentlemen and the Roughs (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/23/2013
Consulting an impressive and largely untapped reservoir of Union Army court martial records and regimental order books, Foote reveals previously untold complexities within northern manhood and illuminates the vital role honor played in making this contested manhood manifest to all within Union ranks...
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HESS: The Civil War in the West (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/23/2013
The Civil War in the West is truly a rich work of historical scholarship and academic analysis. As historians continue to probe the impact of the war farther into the West, Hess's book will certainly be an important starting place...
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How We Need to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Lincoln and Django Unchained (2013)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/16/2013
Alright . . . historians, history buffs, and anyone who cares about history - take a deep breath and repeat after me: "It's OK to love Lincoln and Django Unchained."
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CECELSKI: The Fire of Freedom (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/9/2013
<p>A difficult scholarly challenge is rescuing from the dustbin of the past persons of historical importance, who for whatever reason have fallen into obscurity. This task is ably handled by David S. Cecelski in his book, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway & The Slaves' Civil War...</p> -
TARANTINO: Django Unchained (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/2/2013
That Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is the most effective depiction of American slavery in the recent history of feature films is somewhat surprising and deeply disturbing...
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DAVIS: A Taste For War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/26/2012
More general studies of soldiers have touched on the subject of what soldiers ate, of course, but none in quite so much detail as William C. Davis's A Taste for War (2011), which was originally published in 2003. In this task, Davis follows in the footsteps of John B. Billing's Hardtack and Coffee (1887), but greatly exceeds that Union veteran in the scope of this culinary work...
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HERDEGEN: The Iron Brigade in Civil War and Memory (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/18/2012
Lance Herdegen offers an expanded chronicle of this famous outfit justified, he asserts, by the volume of new source material available since Nolan's work half-a-century ago. The product is a 618-page narrative that yields in equal parts laudable and lamentable results...
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ARENSON: The Great Heart of the Republic (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/12/2012
Adam Arenson's engaging study of mid-nineteenth-century St. Louis is a story of national potential and national failure. Located at the intersection of North, South, and West, St. Louis requires us to re-frame the parameters of civil war...
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Holiday Civil War Trivia Contest: WinnerRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/10/2012
We are pleased to announce the correct answer and the winner of the Holiday Civil War Trivia Contest...
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Holiday Civil War Trivia Contest #2Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/7/2012
The first person to provide the correct answer via email to matt@civilwarmonitor.com will receive a signed set of Ronald Coddington's acclaimed Faces of the Civil War series...
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CODDINGTON: Faces of the Civil War (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/5/2012
Strictly speaking, the men depicted here represent only .0003% of all those who wore the United State uniform in the Civil War, which makes the word represent seem an overreach. But in their own ordinary way, they have a story to tell about the ordinariness of the Civil War...
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Holiday Civil War Trivia ContestRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/3/2012
In conjunction with The Johns Hopkins University Press, we are pleased to announce a Holiday Trivia Contest hosted by The Bookshelf. The winner will receive a signed set of Ron Coddington's acclaimed Civil War Albums.
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SPIELBERG: Lincoln (2012) [Take 2]Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/28/2012
Lincoln is highly entertaining and extraordinarily well acted by the entire cast, and is now debatably the finest Civil War movie we have (audiences have been applauding it as the end credits begin to scroll). Unlike many other big budget historical epics, viewers will see a largely accurate account of events...
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GREEN: Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/21/2012
This volume, part of a series entitled "The Concise Lincoln Library," focuses on Abraham Lincoln's role in the momentous events of 1860--the Republican presidential nomination in May, and his subsequent election in November...
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SPIELBERG: Lincoln (2012) [Take 1]Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/12/2012
The challenges of shaping an entertaining and visually gripping film about a complex moment in American history are quite evident in Steven Spielberg's new film "Lincoln."
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HEWITT & SCHOTT (eds.): Lee and His Generals (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/7/2012
Editors Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott have crafted Lee and His Generals: Essays in Honor of T. Harry Williams into a volume that is a notable tribute to one professor's career and continuing influence, and also provides insights into Confederate generalship...
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DANIELSON: War's Desolating Scourge (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/31/2012
War's Desolating Scourge is a fascinating study of the Federal occupation of North Alabama, and the continued defiance of loyal Confederates in the face of shifting political and military aims...
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BRASHER: The Peninsula Campaign (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/24/2012
This book does what history does at its best. It starts with an argument that has hardened into fixed positions ("Were there any black Confederates?") and revisits the evidence in order to move beyond the original issue and redirect our attention to a larger, equally polarized, and more important historical question...
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FRYE: September Suspense (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/17/2012
There is much to like and little to criticize with September Suspense. In some ways, this book mirrors popular histories of Civil War-era topics written by celebrities or those professional historians who frequent the morning talk shows?absent plagiarism and egregious factual errors...
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STAUFFER & TRODD (eds.): The Tribunal (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/10/2012
The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid is a welcome addition to a small collection of Brown readers, including another by editors John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd, Meteor of War: The John Brown Story...
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JOHNSON: Decided on the Battlefield (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/3/2012
Author David Alan Johnson, a biographer of J. Edgar Hoover, makes his first foray into Civil War history with this vivid though ultimately flawed account of Lincoln's re-election campaign and the final year of the federal war effort. Aiming for a popular readership, Johnson's book opens in a cigar smoke-filled parlor of Cincinnati's Burnet House Hotel...
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BENDER (ed.): Worthy of the Cause for Which They Fight (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/26/2012
Worthy of the Cause is well edited, with ample notes and a comprehensive index... Any historian interested in the Confederate soldier and the western Rebel armies in particular will want to consult this volume...
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MEIER: Suite Harmonic (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/19/2012
An historical novel, Meier's work synthesizes an impressive array of primary and secondary sources in such a way that hits on, though does not fully develop, greater themes such as national identity for Irish immigrants, abolitionism, and the dreariness of war...Suite Harmonic is an engaging read and heavily researched, but Meier's incredulous lack of historical relativity cannot be overlooked...
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BURNS (director): Death and the Civil WarRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/16/2012
The camera pans across a photograph as voices you vaguely recognize speak the words of Americans long dead. Live action shots show rolling hills at dawn, shrouded in fog or drifting smoke; you hear birds calling, the murmurs of men, the sharp crack of rifle fire...
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MCPHERSON: War on the Waters (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/12/2012
War on the Waters is an excellent introduction to the role of navies in the Civil War and a welcome addition to the literature of that conflict...
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LEVIN: Remembering the Battle of the Crater (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/5/2012
Using the Battle of the Crater as his lens, Kevin M. Levin explores the complex and evolving relationship between race and Civil War memory...
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WILLIAMS & BURKHIMER (eds.): The Mary Lincoln Enigma (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 8/29/2012
On September 24, 2012, in Chicago, and on October 1 in Springfield, Mary Todd Lincoln will be retried on the charge of insanity. Perhaps she will fare better than at the first hearing, held in Chicago on May 19, 1875. Declared insane by a civil court jury after three hours of testimony, Mary was committed to Bellevue Place...
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NELSON: Ruin Nation (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 8/22/2012
Nelson examines destruction squarely and without flinching. She has undertaken remarkable primary research and offers powerful stories as well as revealing interpretations of images...
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DIRCK: Lincoln and the Constitution (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 8/15/2012
In under 150 pages, Dirck delivers. Lincoln and the Constitution is a rich, creative, and utterly readable rendering of the development of Abraham Lincoln's constitutional theory from which scholars, too, can benefit...
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SARNA & MENDELSOHN (eds.): Jews and the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 8/8/2012
The Jewish experience during the Civil War has often been ignored or side-stepped by both Civil War historians and historians of American Jewish history. Thankfully, with the publication of Jews and the Civil War, editors Jonathan Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn have put together a collection of seminal previously published works on this topic...
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CURRAN (ed.): John Dooley's Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 8/1/2012
For years, historians have found the diary of Second Lieutenant John Edward Dooley, of Company C of the First Virginia Infantry Regiment, a valuable resource...
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NEWMAN & MUELLER (eds.): Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 8/1/2012
Richard Newman and James Mueller's Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia assembles a collection of insightful scholarly essays pivoting Philadelphia as the ideological, legislative, and social activist epicenter of the national abolitionist movement from the revolutionary era to the outbreak of the Civil War...
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WILLS: George Henry Thomas (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 7/25/2012
All in all, Wills has made a fine contribution to Civil War studies with this biography of a comparatively understudied but profoundly important Union general...
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HUGHES & RUSHING (eds.): Refugitta of Richmond (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 7/18/2012
Constance Cary Harrison's accounts of Civil War Richmond have supplied many a historian with an insider?s view of life in the Confederate capital... her memoir reveals a young woman on the cusp of maturity recounting a life she never expected to endure...
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ARDEN & POWELL: Letters From the Storm (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 7/18/2012
While heavy on military details, The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster will also be of interest to social, gender, family, and local historians, as well as genealogists. The collection offers uncommon insight into sexuality in the period as well...
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EMERSON: Giant in the Shadows (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 7/11/2012
A simply terrific researcher, Emerson has unearthed a breathtaking array of unknown facts and quotes about Robert, and has crafted this avalanche of detail into a truly absorbing account of his long life and times...
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HOLZER, SYMONDS, & WILLIAMS (eds.): The Lincoln Assassination (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 7/11/2012
This book, with its focus on the perpetuated Lincoln myth through the recounting of his death and the obsession with the trial of the assassination conspirators, tells not only about the man himself, but also how he defined the American character and how he continues to influence American political values.
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BRADY: War Upon the Land (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 7/2/2012
Brady's fine book, which launches readers into the Mississippi River campaign rather than one on the Atlantic or Gulf, looks at the role nature played in the Civil War. Her fundamental interest is not the impact war had on the land (although she offers observations in this area) but in nature as historical agent...
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GILPIN: John Brown Still Lives! (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/27/2012
Brilliantly conceived and deeply researched, Gilpin provides an episodic journey through the literature and art that has considered Brown's place in illuminating the issues of violence, equality, and change in American life...
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DUNKELMAN: Marching With Sherman (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/20/2012
Dunkleman's achievement is to show in detail just how incommensurately northerners and southerners experienced, interpreted, and remembered the time Sherman came marching through, as well as how these differences in understanding and recollection have shifted by time and place...
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FLECHE: The Revolution of 1861 (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/20/2012
In a highly readable and provocative new study, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict, Andre Fleche suggests that while Americans may not have been Marxists, or even Beardians, they recognized the relationship between their Civil War and other revolutionary struggles including the revolutions of 1848...
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STERNHELL: Routes of War (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/13/2012
Sternhell evaluates the eastern theater of war (mostly Virginia) through the years of war and into the opening moments of Reconstruction, territory familiar to most students of the Civil War. The novelty in her approach is to consider the entire population - soldiers, civilians, blacks, whites, men, women, Confederates, Unionists, loyalists and deserters - and their experiences from the...
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MCWHIRTER: Battle Hymns (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/6/2012
In Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War, Christian McWhirter analyzes the role music played in dividing the nation in 1860-1861, in sustaining civilian and military morale in the bloody cataclysm of war, and in formulating meanings of the war after Appomattox...
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FELLMAN: Views from the Dark Side of American History (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 6/6/2012
There has always been political purpose to what Fellman has written during his long career and this text is no exception...
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REARDON: With a Sword in One Hand (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/30/2012
In helping us see Jomini and his place within a larger social and intellectual context, Reardon easily solidifies her position as one of our best, most thoughtful historians of the military experience...
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PATCHAN: Second Manassas (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/23/2012
For those interested in learning more about one of the greatest Confederate battlefield successes of the war, a triumph that might even have ended the war had the Union defenders not fought as stubbornly as they did, this is a good book...
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CARNEY: Ministers and Masters (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/16/2012
In Ministers and Masters, Charity Carney furnishes a concise study of antebellum southern Methodist ministers and their often remarkable intersections with the culture of southern honor...
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SCARBOROUGH: The Allstons of Chicora Wood (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/16/2012
The Allstons of Chicora Wood is an interesting and frustrating book. What began as a standard biography of antebellum South Carolina governor and rice planter Robert F.W. Allston, evolved over the course of the author's research into a broader study of the Allston family...
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LAUSE: A Secret Society History of the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/9/2012
Reviewers are not supposed to take authors to task for "not writing a different book" (although we do it all the time), but it might be fair to critique a monograph for not having a different title. Reader beware. This is not a history of secret societies during the Civil War...
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MILLER: John Bell Hood (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/2/2012
Brian Craig Miller argues that considering Hood through the lenses of manhood and memory--he calls his book a "cultural biography"--offers a fresh perspective on a Confederate who could have starred in a Greek tragedy...
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McKnight: CONFEDERATE OUTLAW (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/2/2012
This book is an excellent, well-written analysis that will become the standard biography of Champ Ferguson and will also be essential reading for those seeking insights into the motivations of borderland guerrillas...
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FOLLETT, FONER, JOHNSON (eds.): Slavery's Ghost (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/25/2012
A brief but thought-provoking collection of essays that brings together lectures delivered at the University of Sussex's Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South, Slavery's Ghost is framed by several persistent and important considerations in the historiography of slavery and emancipation.
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LOEWEN & SEBESTA (eds.): The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/25/2012
The book provides teachers and researchers alike with an invaluable archive of speeches, images, political papers, and memoirs that graphically reveal what the Confederacy and its post-war nostalgists actually believed about slavery, secession, race relations, and the whitewashing of the southern past.
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DELBLANCO: The Abolitionist Imagination (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/18/2012
Delbanco's stereotyping and judgmental essay strikes me as a demonstration of how old-fashioned liberalism can be turned into what amounts to morally-determined, preachy neo-conservatism, whether intentionally or not. I share Sinha's reaction that this is a condescending argument, written down from the Arcadian coolness of Morningside Heights...
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BARNHART: Albert Taylor Bledsoe (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/18/2012
Despite the limited material available, Barnhart has made a worthy and instructive effort to explore the significance of the man who became ?the architect of the Confederate interpretation of the conflict?...
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LOWRY: Drinking Patterns in the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/11/2012
Lowry's short, idiosyncratic text is premised on a central question: Did ethnic German and Irish soldiers exhibit abnormal drinking patterns when compared to average "American" troops?
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GALLMAN (ed.): A Tour of Reconstruction (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/4/2012
Gallman has made an important contribution by pulling Dickinson?s letters out of the archives?deciphering her difficult handwriting in the process?and making them more widely accessible. Her writing about Reconstruction can now join the ranks of other published travel writers of the period, such as Sidney Andrews and J.T. Trowbridge, while inserting a powerful female voice among them...
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STOKER: The Grand Design (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/4/2012
In The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War, Donald Stoker answers a question that few historians have asked: did the leaders on either side of the Civil War develop and implement an effective military strategy to achieve their respective political objectives? Rather than focusing on battles and campaigns, Stoker takes his readers on a fascinating tour of the big picture that offers...
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INSCOE (ed.): The Civil War in GeorgiaRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/28/2012
By definition a reference book such as this is not an exhaustive analysis of its subject, and the The Civil War in Georgia does not try to be. Those looking for a sophisticated, concise overview of Georgia?s role in the American Civil War, however, would do well to begin here.
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FULTON: The Reconstruction of Mark Twain (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/21/2012
This is not only a significant new take on Mark Twain and his significance as a public figure and political critic; it also provides new insights into the ambivalent legacy of the border state and western Civil War by viewing it through its impact on one of America?s most celebrated and enduring writers...
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HARRIS: Lincoln and the Border States (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/14/2012
Hard as it might be to imagine, William C. Harris's new book fills a significant gap in the historical literature on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and the Border States is the first serious, comprehensive look at the President's policies in the slaveholding states that remained in the Union...
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HIRSCH & VAN HAFTEN: Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/14/2012
Original ideas about Abraham Lincoln are uncommon. Given the ever-growing pile of Lincoln books and articles, not much remains unsaid or probably even unthought about the man. So on the rare occasion that somebody does think an original thought about him, the thinker (or in this case thinkers) deserve praise merely for the deed...
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LUBRECHT: New Jersey Butterfly Boys in the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/7/2012
In New Jersey Butterfly Boys, Peter T. Lubrecht tells the story of the Third New Jersey Cavalry, a regiment that saw action during the latter half of the Civil War. The unit is an intriguing one that featured an ethnic mix of predominately German and Irish immigrants, as well as soldiers from more than a half dozen other European countries...
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MAGNESS & PAGE: Colonization After Emancipation (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/7/2012
Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page now show us that Lincoln’s interest was hardly furtive after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. It was real, and the president pursued colonization schemes with quiet and unobtrusive fervor...
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WITTENBERG: Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry ActionsRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/29/2012
Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions is a revised edition of cavalry expert Eric Wittenberg’s first book, published originally in 1998. As the full title suggests, Wittenberg focuses on three engagements that occurred on Gettysburg’s final day. This is the kind of book that academic historians ridicule, general Civil War readers find too narrow, and Gettysburg junkies embrace...
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MARTEN (ed.): Children and Youth During the Civil War Era (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/22/2012
By addressing so many fascinating topics in a regional or impressionistic manner, this anthology suggests as many new avenues for research as it satisfies. The authors and editor are to be commended for this valuable contribution to the field...
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BLIGHT: American Oracle (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/21/2012
In a sense, Blight’s new book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, is a continuation of the work he began in Race and Reunion. Rather than chronicle the myriad ways in which the Civil War Centennial intersected with the Civil Right Movement, Blight provides much more intimate portraits of four authors who wrestled with the legacy of the Civil War at the height of the Civil ...
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FARMER-KAISER: Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/15/2012
Mary Farmer-Kaiser’s study, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation, analyzes interactions between bureau agents and freedpersons, and local authorities in order to examine freedwomen’s active role in shaping both public policy and definitions of womanhood, manhood, and race...
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DAVIS & ROBERTSON (eds.): Virginia at War, 1865Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/15/2012
The fifth and final volume of Virginia at War is the best of the series. This treatment of 1865 in the Old Dominion is crisply edited; focused mostly on a single year of the war, unlike some of the earlier volumes; and while only 242 pages including preface and index, it is a meaty contribution to Civil War studies...
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ABRUZZO: Polemical Pain (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/8/2012
Long before Americans, North and South, commenced to shooting each other over slavery and the state of the nation, a related battle raged over the definition of humanitarianism; one that increasingly involved the burgeoning sectional crisis and its debate over slavery. Margaret Abruzzo centers this battle in her cross hairs as she outlines the origins, evolution, and disparate impacts of American...
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MARSHALL: Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/8/2012
Nowhere is the cliché that the North won the Civil War while the South won the peace more true than in Kentucky. Historian Anne E. Marshall's elegantly crafted Creating a Confederate Kentucky tells us exactly how that happened...
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WILSON: The Business of Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/1/2012
Readers will find Wilson’s deeply-researched account well worth the investment as a study of wartime political economy. It explores areas hitherto mostly neglected and rarely explored...
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GINGRICH (et al): The Battle of the Crater: A NovelRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/25/2012
In recent months, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has sprinkled the campaign trail with promotional events for the books he published last year, including the Civil War novel The Battle of the Crater. Politics and marketing aside, how does the new book stand up within the genre of Civil War fiction? And what vision of the war emerges from its pages?
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BROWN (ed.): Remixing the Civil WarRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/18/2012
Touching on such diverse subjects as Barack Obama’s very recent deployment of the Lincoln image, current controversies over the Confederate battle flag, and contemporary black artists’ interpretations of the war, most of the essays in Remixing the Civil War offer rich analytical insights on how and why the Civil War continues to provide a critical touchstone for so many Americans in so many...
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DEMPSEY: Michigan and the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
In Michigan and the Civil War, Jack Dempsey examines his upper-Midwestern home state’s contribution to the North’s victory. If you are a native Wolverine and/or a Civil War buff with a keen interest in the state’s history, you will find much to like in the book. For more serious scholars, though, it will be less satisfying...
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RABLE: God's Almost Chosen Peoples (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
With its prodigious bibliography and its mandate to address the proliferation of faith in the primary sources, God’s Almost Chosen People will be a resource for and an invitation to students of both religion and the Civil War...
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KNIGHT: Confederate Invention (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
Almost all of the records of the Confederate States Patent Office burned with the evacuation of Richmond in 1865, but that did not prevent H. Jackson Knight from compiling this remarkable record of southern invention and inventors during the war. Confederate Invention stands as a testament to the dedication of this dogged researcher, who set out to write a history of Confederate patenting and,...
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SMITH: The Enemy Within (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
Corruption in government and business remains a remarkably neglected aspect of the study of war. However, if the subject remains too elusive for serious discussion in the age of Haliburton, nailing it down in the Civil War years adds entire new layers...
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GAUGHAN: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/4/2012
Visitors who travel to pay their respects to the fallen and experience the beautiful monuments and closely manicured grounds of Arlington may be surprised to learn that the site itself was at the center of one of the most divisive political and legal battles of the post-Civil War period. The legal battle, which culminated in the Supreme Court case of U.S. v. Lee (1882) and the question of who...
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MAURO: A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia (2009)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/28/2011
During the Civil War, Confederate brigadier general J.E.B. Stuart gave a leather album to Laura Ratcliffe, a twenty-five year old resident of Fairfax County, Virginia. This deceptively simple album is the topic of Charles V. Mauro’s most recent book, A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia: The Civil War Album of Laura Ratcliffe...
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GEIGER: Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/21/2011
Built on an impressive foundation of quantitative research, Financial Fraud makes major contributions to the fields of memory and guerrilla warfare in the Civil War. Though Geiger’s documentation of the fraudulent lending used to arm Confederate forces is quite the accomplishment, his work is truly dynamic, powerful, and contentious in his analysis of the unintended consequences and fallout from...
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PETERSEN: Quantrill at Lawrence (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/21/2011
Quantrill at Lawrence: The Untold Story is a well-written and provocative book... many will disagree with his conclusion that the Lawrence attack should be seen as a legitimate and successful cavalry raid...but readers will appreciate his storytelling and historians should give the contentions he makes in telling his untold story further consideration...
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WACHTELL: War No More (2010) Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/14/2011
Whitman's reluctance to reveal to his readers the totality of the "seething hell" of "the real war" he saw in the hospitals is at the heart of Cynthia Wachtell's War No More. Challenging modern authors such as Paul Fussell who view World War I as the watershed moment in the emergence of an antiwar tradition in American letters, Wachtell goes back to Whitman's "Secession war" to find its uncertain...
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THOMPSON (ed.): Tejanos in GrayRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/7/2011
Historians consistently underestimate the ethnic diversity of the Confederacy. Regimental muster rolls from Texas, Louisiana, and other western states abound in German, Irish, French, and Spanish surnames. Until recently, these individuals and the groups they represent have remained largely under the radar...
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MCGINTY: The Body of John Merryman (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/30/2011
But the Supreme Court played a more significant role in the Civil War than many historians have acknowledged; a state of affairs that Brian McGinty has been trying to rectify. He has followed his study of Lincoln and the Court with this superb book that assesses the many angles of Ex Parte Merryman, perhaps the most important case that reached any member of that tribunal during the war...
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URAL (ed.): Civil War Citizens (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/30/2011
Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict is the first effort to examine in one book the wartime experiences of Jewish, Irish, African, Native, and German Americans...
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HARROLD: Border War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/23/2011
In this well-researched and convincing work, distinguished historian Stanley Harrold departs from a traditional North-versus-South tale of sectional breakdown in the decades leading to the Civil War. Instead, he presents a narrative focused on violence and ideological clash in the borderlands...
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MORSMAN: The Big House After Slavery (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/16/2011
Amy Feely Morsman’s The Big House After Slavery examines changing gender relations amongst married elites in postemancipation Virginia. Drawing from family papers, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals, Morsman argues that the dire economic straits of former slaveholding elites during Reconstruction prompted an important transition in the gender dynamics of planter households...
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MARTIN: General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/2/2011
In this lengthy and well-researched new biography of Bragg, Samuel Martin attempts to rectify the Confederate general’s historical record and reputation. It is a commendable effort by the veteran author that will assuredly stir further debate and controversy...
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THOMAS: The Iron Way (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/26/2011
William G. Thomas’s The Iron Way is a tour-de-force, and offers a series of bracing insights about the origins, shape and outcome of the Civil War. Thomas argues that the railroads were sites and symbols of contested modernity in antebellum America. They did not simply symbolize northern industrial might and progress, but also the South’s determination to have modernity on its own terms: to...
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GLATTHAAR: Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/26/2011
Designed as a companion to his superb 2008 work General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse, the statistical volume breaks down the sample of six hundred soldiers that Glatthaar used to tell the story of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia...
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BYNUM: The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/19/2011
“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s latest book about the Civil War home front and its checkered aftermath bring previously ignored strains of political and social dissent back to life through an intricate...
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WOOD: Near Andersonville (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/19/2011
Peter Wood’s incisive new book asks us to set aside imagery of battles and soldiers, and even “Honest Abe,” so that we might visualize the world captured by the painter Winslow Homer in his long-forgotten masterpiece “Near Andersonville.”
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MARTEN: Sing Not War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/12/2011
More so than any previous historian, Marten sheds light on several important questions: how did veterans live, and how were they perceived by society? Sing Not War has given admirable shape and definition to an anemic subfield of Civil War history, and as such it is a welcome addition to the literature. Future studies of the war’s consequences must contend with the important questions that James...
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MCCURRY: Confederate Reckoning (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/12/2011
Confederate Reckoning’s sharp narrative and fresh analysis of the odds faced by slaveholders in the Confederacy and their contributions to its internal collapse is both timely and justified as historians try to reassess key issues of race and gender, such as the roles of southern women and slaves, in relation to the war. McCurry has opened the door for future scholarship and has further cemented...
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BERRY (ed.): Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/5/2011
The essays themselves explore nooks and crevices of Civil War history that are always interesting, sometimes poignant, and often revelatory. Berry’s introduction is especially cogent about the thread that runs through the collection: the “littleness” of the war. Almost certainly this view of the conflict is rooted in the experience of contemporary Americans with war. We have a half century...
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GOODHEART: 1861: The Civil War Awakening (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/28/2011
Adam Goodheart’s much heralded 1861: The Civil War Awakening is an eloquent, innovative, and deeply researched collection of chapter-length vignettes that surveys a variety of events at the outset of our national bloodletting...
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GALLAGHER: The Union War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/28/2011
Ken Burns’s Civil War series made famous Rhode Island soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes’s phrase, “All for the Union.” Gary W. Gallagher agrees with Rhodes. Gallagher emphasizes that, for northerners, the war was one for Union. Although he welcomes the flood of literature that has emphasized the importance of race, slavery, and emancipation to the Civil War, Gallagher believes that this focus has...
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BERTERA & CRAWFORD: The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/16/2011
Since the turn towards social and cultural history in the 1960s and 1970s, many academic institutions have relegated military history to the virtual back burner of “serious” scholarly endeavors. Military histories have, however, remained popular with general readers, and have recently regained scholarly credibility within academia. One reason for this has been a shift of focus from strategies....
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WARSCHAUER: Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/16/2011
The Civil War Centennial saw the publication of histories of state participation in the Civil War. Now, with the approach of the sesquicentennial, it appears as if a new batch of histories building upon the last 50 years of scholarship is on the way. Matthew Warshauer's Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival serves as a model of what a state-level survey of the ...
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The Bookshelf is the digital home of book reviews and author interviews for the Monitor--and your source of the most up-to-date information on all things Civil War literature.
For information concerning book reviews, interviews, other book media-related requests, or general questions, please contact the Book Review Editor:
Matthew C. Hulbert
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