Blogs

The Books & Authors section of our Winter 2017 issue contained our annual roundup of the year's best Civil War titles. As usual, we enlisted the help of a handful of Civil War historians and enthusiasts, avid readers all, and asked them to pick their two favorite books published in 2017. Below are their picks.

Ulysses Grant famously described the Battle of Lookout Mountain as "all poetry."

...an excellent addition to both western theater cavalry studies and the specifics of the battle of Stones River.

The Confederate monument controversy that has exploded in recent months raises fundamental questions about the American Iliad. The removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, is only the best known of several examples that place these questions before us.

This is a delightful journey along the highways and byways of the circuit traveled by lawyer Lincoln...

...[I]f [Grant's] presidential ranking continues to rise, there is little question that Ron Chernow's exhaustive research and accessible writing style will be part of the reason.

Students of the war looking for insights into the connections between camp and home front will find the Cahills' letters to be quite rewarding.

On March 17, 1863, Josiah Marshall Favill, a young lieutenant in the 57th New York Infantry, was one of many soldiers in the Army of the Potomac to observe the elaborate St. Patrick's festivities being hosted by General Thomas Francis Meagher and the men of the Irish Brigade. When he returned to his regiment's camp later that day, Favill recorded the following observations in his diary: 

In the Voices section of the Spring 2018 issue of The Civil War Monitor we highlighted first-person quotes from Union and Confederate troops about the use of tobacco among soldiers and civilians. Unfortunately, we didn't have room to include all that we found. Below are those that didn't make the cut.   

Hindsight, Ayers understands, is often the enemy of understanding.

While not commonly looked upon as part of the battlefield, the Eisenhower Farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, played a significant role during the second and third days of the fighting at Gettysburg.

Early's daring raid is a colorful tale of retribution, diversion, anxiety, and shrewd political calculation.

Sodergren finds that the soldiers in the Army of the Potomac welcomed the change of pace afforded by the Petersburg trenches.

Why is the Civil War mostly absent in one of our most beloved film and television genres?

Forrest might say that Scales, while not getting there first, certainly got there with the most....

Often, the fate of separatist movements is decided not on the field of battle, but in the marble courts of diplomacy.

New studies of guerrilla conflict during the conflict only reinforce the indivisible relationship between slavery and the Civil War.

During the early days of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant's attempt to capture Petersburg, Virginia, in the summer of 1864, 24-year-old Harvard-educated Union surgeon John Gardner Perry wrote a letter in which he recorded the following incident involving a brave, but reckless, young lieutenant. 

While Fremont's fame up to 1856 outsized his actual exploits, he emerged in the tremors of Bleeding Kansas as a novel figure in American politics.