
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: 2/23/23
Their Maryland (2021)
By late September 1862, the soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia were frustrated. One Virginia private cursed the “infernal” Potomac River, and a Georgia sergeant told his fiancée he...
Published: 2/22/23
Administering Freedom (2022)
Administering Freedom opens by recalling William Baltimore’s interview with a member of the Federals Writers’ Project in the late 1930s. Baltimore fled to the Union Army in 1863, enlisted in the...
Published: 2/20/23
The Union Forever (2012)
We are currently in the midst of a U.S. Grant renaissance. Recent studies by Brooks Simpson, Jean Smith, Joan Waugh and H.W. Brands have sought to rehabilitate the reputation of...
Published: 2/15/23
Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri (2022)
In Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri, Larry Wood takes readers into the most complex and contentious period of Missouri’s history to detail the lives of seventeen female Confederate sympathizers....
Published: 2/8/23
Gettysburg’s Southern Front (2022)
Thousands of books have been written about the Gettysburg Campaign, yet talented scholars with fresh insights continue to prove the last has not been said about our most studied military...
Published: 2/1/23
I Saw Death Coming (2023)
The process of Reconstruction after the Civil War is one of the most critical, yet ambiguous periods of US history. One of the key reasons why Reconstruction has remained so...
Published: 1/25/23
The Tale Untwisted (2023)
On Saturday, September 13, 1862, a Hoosier private stumbled upon a stray copy of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 near Frederick, Maryland. The discovery of the “Lost Orders”...
Published: 1/18/23
Ways and Means (2022)
Some have characterized economics as the dismal science. Roger Lowenstein didn’t get that memo. The author of critically acclaimed books on Wall Street and modern financial arrangements, Lowenstein has turned...
Published: 1/11/23
Six Miles from Charleston, Five Minutes to Hell (2022)
James A. Morgan takes readers on a trip around South Carolina’s early Civil War battlefields in the Emerging Civil War Series’ latest offering, Six Miles from Charleston, Five Minutes to...
Published: 1/4/23
Contemners and Serpents (2022)
Contemners and Serpents presents the correspondence of a family who had lived in Pennsylvania and Ohio, served as Presbyterian missionaries in India, but ended up in Georgia, Tennessee, and South...
Published: 12/28/22
“If We are Striking for Pennsylvania” (2022)
Most entries in the Gettysburg Campaign’s extensive bibliography treat the events of July 1, 2, and 3, 1863. Historians have supplied readers with operational studies; accounts that focus on particular...
Published: 12/21/22
C. Vann Woodward (2022)
For anyone who teaches, writes, or reads Southern History, C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) stands out as a figure of singular importance. Born to humble origins in the woods of Arkansas,...
Published: 12/14/22
Hidden History of Civil War Florida (2022)
Volumes have been written about major Civil War battles, military and political leaders, and how the sectional conflict impacted civilian life on the northern and southern home front, but Florida...
Published: 12/7/22
A Fire Bell in the Past (2021)
To commemorate the bicentennial of Missouri’s statehood, editors Jeffrey Pasley and John Hammond have assembled a superb collection of essays that address the controversy surrounding the state’s entry into the...
Published: 11/30/22
The Gospel of Freedom (2022)
Black Evangelical churches in Kentucky formed “an organized ‘underground’ black freedom network” (152) that helped to facilitate freedom-seeking fugitives’ escapes into Canada, Ohio, and other anti-slavery regions. In this important...
Published: 11/23/22
The Nashville and Decatur Railroad in the Civil War (2022)
The Civil War was the first war in U.S. history in which railroads played a significant role transporting troops and martial supplies. In the two decades before the conflict, the...
Published: 11/16/22
An Environmental History of the Civil War (2020)
Building on a growing body of scholarship, authors Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver deliver a stunning synthesis of the Civil War as a “biotic” and “biological event” (4). They illustrate...
Published: 11/9/22
The Last Fire-Eater (2022)
This slender volume took shape as the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University. Historian William A. Link, among our most insightful chroniclers of the long...