
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: 10/31/12
War’s Desolating Scourge (2012)
War’s Desolating Scourge is a fascinating study of the Federal occupation of North Alabama, and the continued defiance of loyal Confederates in the face of shifting political and military aims. Much...
Published: 10/24/12
The Peninsula Campaign (2012)
The subject of African Americans fighting for the South tends to generate two polar responses: either it’s a neo-Confederate fantasy with no more legitimacy than Holocaust denial, or it’s a...
Published: 10/10/12
The Tribunal (2012)
The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid is a welcome addition to a small collection of Brown readers, including another by editors John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd, Meteor...
Published: 10/3/12
Decided on the Battlefield (2012)
Author David Alan Johnson, a biographer of J. Edgar Hoover, makes his first foray into Civil War history with this vivid though ultimately flawed account of Lincoln’s re-election campaign and...
Published: 9/26/12
Worthy of the Cause for Which They Fight (2011)
Daniel Harris Reynolds won fame as a general leading Arkansas troops in the Army of Tennessee, but he was a native of Ohio, where he graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University....
Published: 9/19/12
Suite Harmonic (2011)
Emily Meier’s heavily researched Suite Harmonic: A Civil War Novel of Rediscovery imaginatively recounts the Given family history—in particular John Given Jr. and sister Catherine (Kate)—from 1862 through 1898. She narrates...
Published: 9/16/12
Death and the Civil War (2012)
The camera pans across a photograph as voices you vaguely recognize speak the words of Americans long dead. Live action shots show rolling hills at dawn, shrouded in fog or...
Published: 9/12/12
War on the Waters (2012)
War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865, is a comprehensive account of naval operations during the American Civil War by prize-winning historian James McPherson. Union and Confederate...
Published: 9/5/12
Remembering the Battle of the Crater (2012)
In early November 1903, nearly 20,000 people gathered in Petersburg, Virginia, anxiously awaiting a reenactment of the Battle of the Crater. For one seventeen year old, Douglas Southall Freeman, the...
Published: 8/29/12
The Mary Lincoln Enigma (2012)
On September 24, 2012, in Chicago, and on October 1 in Springfield, Mary Todd Lincoln will be retried on the charge of insanity. Perhaps she will fare better than at...
Published: 8/22/12
Ruin Nation (2012)
For the last quarter century scholars have worked to recover an essential and missing element of Civil War history: a fuller understanding of the destruction brought by the war. Megan...
Published: 8/15/12
Lincoln and the Constitution (2012)
In his contribution to Southern Illinois University Press’s “Concise Lincoln Library” series, historian Brian R. Dirck promises readers a book that is “relatively straightforward and basic: an overview of Lincoln’s...
Published: 8/8/12
Jews and the Civil War (2011)
The Jewish experience during the Civil War has often been ignored or side-stepped by both Civil War historians and historians of American Jewish history. Thankfully, with the publication of Jews...
Published: 8/1/12
Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia (2011)
Richard Newman and James Mueller’s Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia assembles a collection of insightful scholarly essays pivoting Philadelphia as the ideological, legislative, and social activist epicenter of the national abolitionist...
Published: 8/1/12
John Dooley’s Civil War (2011)
For years, historians have found the diary of Second Lieutenant John Edward Dooley, of Company C of the First Virginia Infantry Regiment, a valuable resource. What they did not know,...
Published: 7/25/12
George Henry Thomas (2012)
While historians of the American Civil War have by no means ignored him, they have not lavished as much attention on George Henry Thomas as one might expect, considering his...
Published: 7/18/12
Letters From the Storm (2010)
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has recently incited a number of historians—academic and popular alike—to revisit the battlefields, the letters, the Blue and the Gray. Letters from the...
Published: 7/18/12
Refugitta of Richmond (2011)
Constance Cary Harrison’s accounts of Civil War Richmond have supplied many a historian with an insider’s view of life in the Confederate capital. Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention: Women...