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: 9/28/22
Count the Dead (2022)
This little book packs a huge punch. It makes a powerful case that the project of counting the dead—both literally and figuratively—occupies the center of the historical enterprise. Data about...
Published: 9/21/22
The Families’ Civil War (2022)
Chasing the faint archival traces made by 185 Philadelphians who shouldered muskets in three African American Civil War regiments, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.’s debut monograph renders legible the struggles of...
Published: 9/14/22
When Hell Came to Sharpsburg (2022)
When tallying the costs of Civil War battles, historians typically supply a register of soldiers killed, wounded, missing, or captured. Often, they consider how those losses resounded in hearts and...
Published: 9/7/22
James Longstreet and the American Civil War (2022)
James Longstreet and the American Civil War argues that Longstreet’s post-Civil War defection to the Republican Party, rather than historical evidence, inspired many Confederate veterans and later historians to fault...
Published: 9/3/22
The Whartons’ War (2022)
“Emotion” is a key word for reading the Civil War letters of Confederate General Gabriel C. Wharton and his wife Anne Radford Wharton. In recent years, historians such as Michael...
Published: 8/31/22
W.G. (2022)
Donna and William Burtch’s W.G. explores the fascinating life of W.G. Raymond, a white Baptist preacher whose experiences included everything from service as a United States army officer in the Civil...
Published: 8/24/22
Only the Clothes on Her Back (2022)
Princeton University Professor Laura F. Edwards is best known for her sterling work on the legal history of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Her ability to vividly portray the...
Published: 8/17/22
Been in the Storm So Long (1979)
On the one-year anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize winning scholar Leon F. Litwack’s death, historian Evan C. Jones offers this extended retrospective on Litwack’s magnum opus. Throughout the nineteenth century,...
Published: 8/10/22
Dreams of Victory (2022)
Among Southerners of the Civil War generation, no Confederate general inspired as much debate and strong feelings as Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard; he was either loved or hated. History, however,...
Published: 7/27/22
A Failed Vision of Empire (2022)
In 1870, an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal provided an overview of the history of manifest destiny.[1] Orators, the author commented, used to speak “earnestly of the ‘manifest destiny’ of our Republic...
Published: 7/20/22
All for the Union (2022)
In what can only be described as a labor of love, John Simpson provides readers with a detailed glimpse of the climactic eastern theater of the rebellion through the lens...
Published: 7/13/22
In The Houses of Their Dead (2022)
The same afternoon actor Edwin Booth was laid to rest in New York City, more than twenty federal workers perished at Ford’s Theater—the place where, nearly three decades before, his...
Published: 7/6/22
To Walk About in Freedom (2022)
In the middle of the Great Depression, the federal government launched an ambitious effort to interview surviving ex-slaves. Employees for the Federal Writers’ Project scoured the South and produced reams...
Published: 6/29/22
Gettysburg (2022)
No military engagement in American history (and perhaps few in all of world antiquity) has received more attention than the Battle of Gettysburg. One recent bibliography of the war’s bloodiest...
Published: 6/15/22
Spectacle of Grief (2022)
Early on the morning of Sunday, January 15, 1893, several thousand people huddled outside of Huntington Hall in Lowell, Massachusetts, undeterred by the biting winds that squalled across New England....
Published: 6/8/22
Gettysburg’s Lost Love Story (2022)
History is replete with heart-rending stories of star-crossed lovers. Marc Anthony and Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Emma Hamilton, General John Reynolds...
Published: 6/1/22
Love & Duty (2022)
Historian Angela Esco Elder’s debut monograph joins a growing body of scholarship probing the lived consequences of the Civil War. Complementing recent work by Diane Miller Sommerville, Brian Craig Miller,...
Published: 5/25/22
Salmon P. Chase (2022)
Following up on his popular biographies of Secretary of State William Seward [2012] and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton [2017], Walter Stahr’s most recent book tells the story of Lincoln’s...