The Bookshelf

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

There has always been political purpose to what Fellman has written during his long career and this text is no exception...