The Bookshelf

A comprehensive history of the most complicated, diverse, and misunderstood part of the American Civil War.

...a balanced and solid biography of one of the Civil War's more obscure figures.

Women, enslaved African Americans, and upper-class planters determined the parameters within which the Confederate military effort would succeed or fail on the battlefield.

The end of the Civil War ultimately brought no peace to the Indian Territory....

Wills' study...underscores the sheer ubiquity of death that descended upon the nation between 1861 and 1865.

The massacre at Mother Emanuel simultaneously underscores the endurance of Civil War memory in the contemporary United States and the extent to which Americans still struggle, often violently, to control the fundamental meanings of those memories.

Historic turning points can hinge on the stroke of a pen or a turn in the road.

[Charles Lamar's] correspondence is a particular boon for historians of the slave trade...

Fortunately, this classic campaign has a chronicler worthy of its singular importance to the Union's ultimate victory.

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