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: 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...
Published: 12/28/11
A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia (2009)
During the Civil War, Confederate brigadier general J.E.B. Stuart gave a leather album to Laura Ratcliffe, a twenty-five year old resident of Fairfax County, Virginia. “Presented to Miss Laura Ratcliffe,”...
Published: 12/21/11
Quantrill at Lawrence (2011)
Quantrill at Lawrence: The Untold Story is a well-written and provocative book that ultimately falls short of its goal. William Clarke Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1863,...
Published: 12/21/11
Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War (2010)
Those who pay attention to the world of Civil War history are well aware that Mark W. Geiger’s recent work, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865,...
Published: 12/14/11
War No More (2010)
Even the most casual student of the Civil War frequently encounters Walt Whitman’s canonical statement from Specimen Days that “the real war will never get in the books.” While historians of the...
Published: 12/7/11
Tejanos in Gray (2011)
Historians consistently underestimate the ethnic diversity of the Confederacy. Regimental muster rolls from Texas, Louisiana, and other western states abound in German, Irish, French, and Spanish surnames. Until recently, these...
Published: 11/30/11
Civil War Citizens (2010)
Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict is the first effort to examine in one book the wartime experiences of Jewish, Irish, African, Native, and German Americans....
Published: 11/30/11
The Body of John Merryman (2011)
Among the battles that Abraham Lincoln fought to restore the Union—against the Confederacy, against the opposition party, against members of his own party—his dealings with the Supreme Court and Chief...
Published: 11/23/11
Border War (2010)
In this well-researched and convincing work, distinguished historian Stanley Harrold departs from a traditional North-versus-South tale of sectional breakdown in the decades leading to the Civil War. Instead, he presents...
Published: 11/16/11
The Big House After Slavery (2010)
Amy Feely Morsman’s The Big House After Slavery examines changing gender relations among married elites in post-emancipation Virginia. Drawing from family papers, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals, Morsman argues that the...
Published: 11/9/11
Going Back the Way They Came (2011) & I Will Give Them One More Shot (2011)
It was in the 1950s when historian Bruce Catton first called attention to the value of Civil War regimental studies. These personal collections of experiences and quotations by the men...
Published: 11/2/11
General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. (2011)
A consensus among many Civil War historians is that the Confederacy lost the conflict in the West, the vast region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Union armies...