Book Reviews
The digital home of book reviews and author interviews—and your source of the most up-to-date information on all things Civil War literature
Published: 9/25/13
The Petersburg Campaign (2012)
The siege of Petersburg remains one of the most understudied campaigns in the American Civil War. Although one can point to several fine studies of individual operations and a few...
Published: 9/18/13
The World’s Largest Prison (2012)
A military prison need not have operated for long to warrant remembrance. That is the primary premise from which John K. Derden begins to record the short history of Camp...
Published: 9/11/13
Disunion (2013)
In the fall of 2010 The New York Times marked the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s election and the commencement of the Civil War by launching “Disunion,” a daily feature on its “Opinionator”...
Published: 9/4/13
Remembering the Civil War (2013)
For ten years, the study of the historical memory of the Civil War has been dominated by David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion. New scholarship has filled in gaps and...
Published: 8/28/13
The Battles That Made Abraham Lincoln (2012)
The “battles” referenced in the title to this book are not Gettysburg, or any of the famous military showdowns of the Civil War. Larry Tagg instead examines the various ways...
Published: 8/21/13
Blood and Daring (2013)
Like a traveler without a passport, John Boyko’s Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation finds itself intellectually detained at the border. Solid enough...
Published: 8/14/13
Guerrilla Hunters in Civil War Missouri (2013)
Although historians once dismissed Missouri as the “sideshow” of the Civil War, it has since become notorious as the scene of a long, brutal, and divisive guerrilla war. In fact,...
Published: 8/7/13
Kennesaw Mountain (2013)
In a brutal series of engagements fought between May and September 1864, the Atlanta Campaign became one of the crucial moments in the Civil War. Often overshadowed by U.S. Grant’s...
Published: 7/31/13
A Punishment on the Nation (2012)
In A Punishment on the Nation, Brian Miller presents the nearly two hundred letters of Private Silas W. Haven, a member of the 27th Iowa Volunteer Infantry. Haven, born in...
Published: 7/24/13
Copperhead (2013)
What is the worst sin a movie can commit? Excessive, gratuitous violence? Flagrant disregard for universal truths? A meandering plot? Terrible acting? To my mind, the worst sin a movie...
Published: 7/17/13
Battle of Stones River (2012)
On the first day of the Battle of Stones River, Federal troops struggled to push back a fierce Confederate assault. The bugler for an Ohio regiment was fleeing from the...
Published: 7/17/13
The Fall of the House of Dixie (2013)
In The Fall of the House of Dixie, Bruce Levine sets out to reintroduce the Civil War to the American public not as a series of battles but as a...
Published: 7/10/13
A Surgeon’s Tale (2011)
The American Civil War was a veritable bloodbath for the men who waged it. More than 400,000 Billy Yanks were wounded throughout the conflict—245,000 of those casualties were gunshot wounds....
Published: 7/10/13
River of Dark Dreams (2013)
Walter Johnson opens River of Dark Dreams with a bang and a dream: the 1850 explosion of the steam boat Anglo-Norman at New Orleans and Thomas Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” dream....
Published: 7/3/13
A Field Guide to Gettysburg (2013)
This is the second collaboration between Carol Reardon, a professor of military history at Penn State University, and Tom Vossler, a retired Army colonel and licensed Gettysburg battlefield guide since...
Published: 7/3/13
The Gettysburg Campaign in Numbers and Losses (2013)
Civil War veterans were obsessed with numbers and losses. Regimental historians corresponded with their former comrades for decades, hoping to render an “accurate” depiction of their wartime travails. Grand Army...
Published: 6/26/13
The Election of 1860 Reconsidered (2013)
This series of essays on the election of 1860 had its origins in the third annual symposium of the Civil War Study Group, hosted by the University of Indianapolis, in...
Published: 6/12/13
What the Yankees Did to Us (2012)
General William Tecumseh Sherman was a very bad man. This is the main point of Stephen Davis’ exhaustive history of the Union capture of Atlanta in 1864. Davis makes his...