Quinn McPhail
Published: 7/22/20
In The Waves (2020)
On a calm, cool February night in 1864, the USS Housatonic lay at anchor just outside of Charleston harbor. One of many Union ships blockading one of the Confederacy’s few remaining...
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Published: 7/16/20
U.S. Army Surgical Kit
In 1918, physician William Keen, who had served as a Union army surgeon during the Civil War, reflected on the surgical conditions he and his fellow military doctors faced in the...
Published: 7/15/20
Arguing Until Doomsday (2020)
Listening to a debate between Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis in February 1859, Georgia senator Alfred Iverson told his colleagues, “If we permit these gentlemen to go on brandying arguments...
Published: 7/8/20
Vicksburg Besieged (2020)
Since 2018, the Vicksburg campaign bibliography has grown considerably. In addition to Donald L. Miller’s gripping narrative history, the inexhaustible Timothy B. Smith has produced important studies of Grierson’s Mississippi...
Published: 7/1/20
The Three-Cornered War (2020)
Since the origins of the Civil War were rooted in discussions over western territory, one would think scholarship on the ensuing conflict might keep the American West in view. Yet...
Published: 6/24/20
Grand Army Women (2020)
As the largest fraternal order for Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic has invited much attention from historians. Stuart F. McConnell, Mary R. Dearing, and Barbara A. Gannon—among...
Published: 6/17/20
Targeted Tracks (2019)
The Civil War is often considered a “modern” war for its use of such technologies as photography, telegraphic communication, aerial reconnaissance, steam-powered and ironclad vessels, repeating rifles, and strategic use...
Published: 6/10/20
How the South Won the Civil War (2020)
At the Neshoba County Fair in 1980, Ronald Reagan “brought the South and the West together to take over national politics” (185). Reagan, wearing a cowboy hat—a regular feature of...
Published: 6/3/20
Rebels in the Making (2020)
Rebels in the Making, writes author William Barney, offers “for the first time, a one-volume narrative history of secession in all the fifteen slave states” (3). In the ensuing 315...
Published: 5/27/20
Abraham Among the Yankees (2020)
In September 1848, a virtually unknown, thirty-nine-year-old Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln lurched north on an urgent political errand. Only weeks before, his Whig Party had nominated General Zachary Taylor—a...
Published: 5/20/20
Pinkertons, Prostitutes, and Spies (2019)
John Stewart seeks to unravel the complexity of Hattie Lawton and Timothy Webster’s clandestine operations in Richmond, Virginia. The author begins his narrative with a prologue that introduces his main...
Published: 5/13/20
“Lee Is Trapped, and Must Be Taken” (2019)
Historians have parsed virtually every aspect of July 1-3, 1863. Yet far fewer scholars have explored the Gettysburg Campaign as a whole with the same level of detail and analysis....
Published: 5/6/20
Iowa Confederates in the Civil War (2019)
By most estimates, approximately three million soldiers served during the Civil War. The border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri—which remained devoted to the Union while keeping slavery intact—famously...
Published: 4/29/20
Confederate Soldiers in the American Civil War (2019)
Savas Beatie has continued to solidify its reputation as a premier military and general history publishing company by adding Mark Hughes’s Confederate Soldiers in the American Civil War: Facts and...
Published: 4/22/20
The False Cause (2020)
Historians have long understood that the Lost Cause, the memory of the Civil War nurtured by white Southerners, rests on a loose reading of the historical record. The Lost Cause...
Published: 4/15/20
In Their Letters, In Their Words (2019)
Editor Mark Flotow’s inspiration for this book was a previous project that had him scouring the letters of Illinois soldiers to understand their wartime experiences. Realizing the impact of the...
Published: 4/8/20
Gold and Freedom (2015)
The title of Nicolas Barreyre’s book, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, refers to “the intersection of two major post-Civil War debates: one about the economic consequences of...
Published: 4/1/20
Mississippi Bishop William Henry Elder (2019)
Ryan Starrett has produced an excellent, if limited local history. Starrett writes about the life and work of William Henry Elder, a Catholic Bishop in Confederate Mississippi. His narrative relies...