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: 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...
Published: 7/11/12
The Lincoln Assassination (2010)
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday in 1865 shocked the nation, elevated the fallen President to martyrdom, immediately inspired mythmakers, and intrigued historians for years. Contributors to The Lincoln Assassination:...
Published: 7/11/12
Giant in the Shadows (2012)
Abraham Lincoln’s only surviving son has long been a hard fellow to like. For one thing, he was much more like his presumptuous mother than his endearingly modest and sublimely...
Published: 7/2/12
War Upon the Land (2012)
Lisa Brady could have opened her book with a relevant might-have-been story. Fort Pickens in Pensacola nearly trumped Fort Sumter as the birthplace of the Civil War. Washington simultaneously dispatched...
Published: 6/27/12
John Brown Still Lives! (2011)
The catalysts, conduct, context, and consequences of the Civil War era continue to resonate through American intellectual and popular life. Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and to a lesser extent,...
Published: 6/20/12
The Revolution of 1861 (2012)
Perhaps the oldest and most out of favor interpretation of the American Civil War was formulated by Karl Marx who saw it as only one aspect of an international revolution...
Published: 6/20/12
Marching With Sherman (2012)
By now most accounts of Sherman’s war-altering campaigns across Georgia and then up through the Carolinas follow the same well-trod paths. Many books, like Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm, give...
Published: 6/13/12
Routes of War (2012)
Some changes in historical interpretation are driven by uncovering new sources. Others come as a consequence of new methods or new analytical interests. Still others derive more simply, from scholars...
Published: 6/6/12
Views from the Dark Side of American History (2011)
And there it was. The question I knew she would eventually ask, this undergraduate who writes for her campus newspaper. “So why did you become interested in the Civil War?”...
Published: 6/6/12
Battle Hymns (2012)
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...