Books and Discussions
Published: 5/2/12
John Bell Hood (2010)
The Civil War destroyed John Bell Hood’s life. After spending several years on the Texas frontier as a rising young officer in the pre-war U. S. Cavalry, the Kentuckian made...
Published: 4/25/12
The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (2010)
The great mnemonic power of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy has been in its ability to uphold almost all of the original tenets of its long-standing mythologies (the war...
Published: 4/25/12
Slavery’s Ghost (2011)
A brief but thought-provoking collection of essays that brings together lectures delivered at the University of Sussex’s Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South, Slavery’s Ghost is framed...
Published: 4/18/12
The Abolitionist Imagination (2012)
This call and response volume grew from the Alexis de Tocqueville Lectures on American Politics at Harvard. Andrew Delblanco provoked and the other authors responded. Delbanco, a literary historian, holds...
Published: 4/18/12
Albert Taylor Bledsoe (2011)
Terry Barnhart’s intriguing biography of Albert Taylor Bledsoe reveals that Bledsoe, like the Old South he cherished, was a paradox. Long recognized as one of the most respected—and most unrepentant—southern...
Published: 4/11/12
Drinking Patterns in the Civil War (2011)
In his General Orders of February 4, 1862, General George McClellan admonished his troops that “total abstinence from intoxicating liquors … would be worth fifty thousand men to the armies...
Published: 4/4/12
The Grand Design (2010)
In The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War, Donald Stoker answers a question that few historians have asked: Did the leaders on either side of the Civil War...
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,...