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: 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...
Published: 1/16/12
Remembering Race and Reunion: Ten Years Later
There are four copies of David W. Blight’s magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory on the bookshelves lining my study, each replete with eager (and sometimes skeptical)...
Published: 1/11/12
The Enemy Within (2011)
Corruption in government and business remains a remarkably neglected aspect of the study of war. The unstated assumption behind this relative unconcern regards these impacts as collateral damage unworthy of...
Published: 1/11/12
Confederate Invention (2011)
Students of the American Civil War continue to make something out of very little. Almost all of the records of the Confederate States Patent Office burned with the evacuation of...
Published: 1/11/12
God’s Almost Chosen Peoples (2010)
“I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people,” Lincoln told an audience...
Published: 1/11/12
Michigan and the Civil War (2011)
The North may have won the Civil War, but the South has captured most of its historiography. Since the vast bulk of the fighting took place there, and since slavery—the...
Published: 1/4/12
The Last Battle of the Civil War (2011)
Americans were recently shocked to learn that an unknown number of servicemen and women were buried in the wrong plots at Arlington National Cemetery. The gross negligence involved stands in...