The Bookshelf

This winning entry was submitted by Mr. Frank Gryzb of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, to The Civil War Monitor's "Weirding the War Essay Contest"?an event held in honor of Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges (edited by our own Dr. Stephen Berry).

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Nowhere is the cliche 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...

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...

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?

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...