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: 5/8/13
Becoming Confederates (2013)
Much of the work of the historian comes down to explaining what drove historic actors to behave as they did. For Civil War historians the questions are unusually thorny, and...
Published: 5/1/13
Freedom National (2012)
James Oakes has received high praise for his Lincoln Prize winning Freedom National: the Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. When an eminent nineteenth-century historian tackles this topic...
Published: 4/24/13
Diverging Loyalties (2011)
Bruce T. Gourley’s Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the Civil War is an engrossing, enlightening exploration of our nation’s greatest trauma, as seen through the eyes of a unique...
Published: 4/17/13
A Self-Evident Lie (2013)
Ironically, the falsehood discussed in Jeremy J. Tewell’s important study, A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom would not be considered a lie today. His title refers...
Published: 4/10/13
Guerrillas in Civil War Missouri (2012)
The past several years have seen a great increase in interest in the history of the guerrilla conflict by both scholars and amateur historians alike. It seems that wherever one...
Published: 4/3/13
The CSS Virginia (2012)
As one of the main participants in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the CSS Virginia has received considerable attention from historians. But these works tend to focus on the ship’s novel...
Published: 3/27/13
Freedom Papers (2012)
In September 1899, Edouard Tinchant (1841-1915), a man of Haitian descent with an unusual background, including service in Company C 6th Louisiana Volunteers, during the Civil War, wrote to Maximo...
Published: 3/20/13
John Brown’s Spy (2012)
In the past 20 years no less than three significant monographs, each written by a capable scholar, have documented and analyzed the life of abolitionist and insurrectionist John Brown or...
Published: 3/20/13
Abraham Lincoln and White America (2012)
Countless books and articles about Abraham Lincoln’s views and policies on slavery and race have appeared over the years, but Brian Dirck is the first historian to explore Lincoln’s identity...
Published: 3/13/13
Bully for the Band! (2012)
As the title of his book suggests, James A. Davis, Professor of Musicology and Chair of the Music History Area at the State University of New York, Fredonia, has transcribed...
Published: 3/6/13
Lincoln and Citizens’ Rights in Civil War Missouri (2011)
As a wartime president tasked with holding together a country ripping at the seams, Abraham Lincoln sought and utilized every means of maintaining the Union. For this, Lincoln has often...
Published: 2/27/13
African American Faces of the Civil War (2012)
When the movie Glory debut in 1989 it was not commonly recognized that African Americans had fought in the Civil War. Although many of the details were fictionalized, the film’s depiction...
Published: 2/27/13
The Civil War: The First Year (2011)
In his incisive 2005 anthology What Caused the Civil War?, Edward L. Ayers called on his fellow historians to challenge the simplicity and triumphalism of Americans’ “common sense” Civil War...
Published: 2/20/13
Killing Lincoln (2013)
The reviewer sits down on the couch. She picks up the remote control. It is 7:57 p.m. The docudrama is entitled Killing Lincoln, like the book upon which it is based....
Published: 2/13/13
My Old Confederate Home (2010)
Since Bell Irvin Wiley published The Life of Johnny Reb in 1943, historians have worked tirelessly to shed light on the lives of ordinary Civil War soldiers. However, because many studies...
Published: 2/6/13
Joshua L. Chamberlain: The Life in Letters (2012)
This collection of documents relating to the life and career of famed Union general Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is both richly rewarding as well as enormously disappointing. First, the deep problems...
Published: 1/30/13
Lincoln’s Hundred Days (2012)
“The Halls of Congress are like a dirty privy,” William Porcher Miles noted in 1858—“a man will carry off some of the stink even in his clothes.”1 As depicted in Louis...
Published: 1/23/13
The Civil War in the West (2012)
The Civil War West is quickly becoming all the rage, emerging as the theme of conferences, the focus of panels dedicated to new directions in the field, and even appearing...