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: 4/4/12
A Tour of Reconstruction (2011)
Anna Dickinson got right to the point during her travels through the South in 1875. The landscape she encountered in North Carolina was “nothing but dreariness, dirt, poverty, brutishness, &...
Published: 3/28/12
The Civil War in Georgia (2011)
In 1998 leaders of the Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press convened a meeting of about a dozen librarians, historians, curators, and other scholars to discuss the...
Published: 3/21/12
The Reconstruction of Mark Twain (2010)
As his title and subtitle suggest, Joe Fulton has constructed a conversion narrative for Mark Twain in which he manages to offer a variety of fresh insights into a life...
Published: 3/14/12
Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason (2010)
Original ideas about Abraham Lincoln are uncommon. Given the ever-growing pile of Lincoln books and articles, not much remains unsaid or probably even unthought about the man. So on the...
Published: 3/14/12
Lincoln and the Border States (2011)
Hard as it might be to imagine, William C. Harris’s new book fills a significant gap in the historical literature on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and the Border States is the first...
Published: 3/7/12
Colonization After Emancipation (2011)
Abraham Lincoln’s persistent interest in colonizing freed blacks out of the United States to solve the thorny problem of what to do with a distrusted black minority within American society...
Published: 3/7/12
New Jersey Butterfly Boys in the Civil War (2011)
In New Jersey Butterfly Boys, Peter T. Lubrecht tells the story of the Third New Jersey Cavalry, a regiment that saw action during the latter half of the Civil War....
Published: 2/29/12
Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions (2011)
This is the kind of book that academic historians ridicule, general Civil War readers find too narrow, and Gettysburg junkies embrace. Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions is a revised edition of cavalry...
Published: 2/28/12
Weird Essay Winner
This winning entry was submitted by Mr. Frank Grzyb of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, to The Civil War Monitor’s “Weirding the War Essay Contest”—an event held in honor of Weirding the War:...
Published: 2/22/12
Children and Youth During the Civil War Era (2012)
Despite the explosion of social history since the 1970s, few historians of children or the Civil War have addressed the topic of children and childhood during the Civil War. The...
Published: 2/21/12
American Oracle (2011)
David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001) established him as one of the foremost scholars of Civil War memory. In that volume, Blight argued that in the decades after the Civil War,...
Published: 2/15/12
Virginia at War, 1865
The fifth and final volume of Virginia at War is the best of the series. This treatment of 1865 in the Old Dominion is crisply edited; focused mostly on a single...
Published: 2/15/12
Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau (2010)
“If women-whippers and negro shooters go unpunished in this section of the United States, it will be many years before the removal of the curse of military rule as it...
Published: 2/8/12
Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010)
Nowhere is the cliché that the North won the Civil War while the South won the peace more true than in Kentucky. Historian Anne E. Marshall’s elegantly crafted Creating a...
Published: 2/8/12
Polemical Pain (2011)
Long before Americans, North and South, commenced to shooting each other over slavery and the state of the nation, a related battle raged over the definition of humanitarianism; one that...
Published: 2/1/12
The Business of Civil War (2010)
At its core, Mark R. Wilson’s volume on military mobilization during the Civil War is the story of Union procurement principles, policies, and practices. Few observers anticipated that the war...
Published: 1/25/12
The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (2011)
In recent months, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has sprinkled the campaign trail with promotional events for the books he published last year, including the Civil War novel The Battle...
Published: 1/18/12
Remixing the Civil War (2011)
Who could have anticipated that, by the early years of the 21st century, America’s bloodiest military conflict might be re-imagined in the form of a photograph of nine smiling Lincoln...