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: 4/8/20
Gold and Freedom (2015)
The title of Nicolas Barreyre’s book, Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction, refers to “the intersection of two major post-Civil War debates: one about the economic consequences of...
Published: 4/1/20
Mississippi Bishop William Henry Elder (2019)
Ryan Starrett has produced an excellent, if limited local history. Starrett writes about the life and work of William Henry Elder, a Catholic Bishop in Confederate Mississippi. His narrative relies...
Published: 3/25/20
Caught in the Maelstrom (2019)
The Civil War was fought over the future of the continental West. Would conquered territories of indigenous people be cultivated by enslaved Africans, or exploited by white immigrants? It is...
Published: 3/18/20
Imperfect Union (2020)
Steve Inskeep is a U.S. journalist who hosts NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First; he prides himself on promoting lesser-known stories.[1] In Imperfect Union, Inskeep “aims to bring the Frémonts back into view through the...
Published: 3/11/20
The Last Battleground (2019)
Philip Gerard’s The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina originated as an extensive series of articles in Our State: Celebrating North Carolina magazine commemorating the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. There is...
Published: 3/4/20
Vicksburg (2019)
Civil War historians have long made much ado about July 1863. Generations of scholars and writers have argued that the war reached a turning point with Robert E. Lee’s defeat...
Published: 2/26/20
Congress at War (2020)
The history of Civil War politics has often been focused on Abraham Lincoln’s statesmanship, management of his feuding Cabinet, and ability to steer the country towards emancipation. Fergus M. Bordewich...
Published: 2/19/20
Rebel Guerrillas (2018)
In a narrative history of the Civil War’s western and eastern theaters, Paul Williams studies three of the Confederate Army’s most prominent irregular warriors: John Mosby, William Quantrill, and “Bloody...
Published: 2/12/20
Armies of Deliverance (2019)
As a National Park Service interpretive ranger and now as a college educator, I have been asked innumerable times to recommend the best one-volume book on the Civil War. Without...
Published: 2/5/20
British Blockade Runners in the American Civil War (2019)
On April 19, 1861, less than a week after the cannon roar in Charleston harbor that marked the opening of U.S. Civil War had ceased, President Abraham Lincoln announced a...
Published: 1/29/20
When It Was Grand (2020)
The term radical originated with the Latin radix, or source, and it has always had popular connections with the steely determination to tear-up obnoxious ideas or movements by their roots. It came...
Published: 1/22/20
Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (2019)
In many ways, the United States is a warrior nation. With bases across the globe and currently involved in multiple conflicts, it has a national anthem (officially adopted in 1931)...
Published: 1/15/20
Living By Inches (2019)
Despite many gloomy predictions, the sesquicentennial hardly proved the twilight of Civil War scholarship. To the contrary, the field may be entering its most fecund period to date as historians...
Published: 1/8/20
“Our Little Monitor” (2018)
Why another Monitor book? In Our Little Monitor, authors Anna Holloway and Jonathan W. White demonstrate that a fascinating subject is never exhausted. Cutting-edge maritime archaeology and thorough historical research combine to produce an engaging...
Published: 1/1/20
Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy (2019)
As we come to the end of the decade following the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, there is no discernable slowdown in the publication of books on the sixteenth president....
Published: 12/25/19
Bicycling Gettysburg (2019)
The battle fought on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863, in Adams County, Pennsylvania, “has brought the name of Gettysburg from rural obscurity, to world-wide celebrity,” wrote historian and landscape...
Published: 12/18/19
Too Useful to Sacrifice (2019)
George B. McClellan has now received his day in court. In five chapters detailing Little Mac’s conduct during the 1862 Maryland Campaign, Steven Stotelmyer takes up the defense attorney’s pen...
Published: 12/11/19
William Gregg’s Civil War (2019)
Joseph M. Beilein Jr. promises “a hellish and invigorating ride” through Missouri’s guerrilla war, and in that respect William Gregg’s memoir does not disappoint. Gregg’s prose is brisk and lively...