The Bookshelf
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CARNEY: Ministers and Masters (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/16/2012
In Ministers and Masters, Charity Carney furnishes a concise study of antebellum southern Methodist ministers and their often remarkable intersections with the culture of southern honor...
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SCARBOROUGH: The Allstons of Chicora Wood (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/16/2012
The Allstons of Chicora Wood is an interesting and frustrating book. What began as a standard biography of antebellum South Carolina governor and rice planter Robert F.W. Allston, evolved over the course of the author's research into a broader study of the Allston family...
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LAUSE: A Secret Society History of the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/9/2012
Reviewers are not supposed to take authors to task for "not writing a different book" (although we do it all the time), but it might be fair to critique a monograph for not having a different title. Reader beware. This is not a history of secret societies during the Civil War...
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MILLER: John Bell Hood (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/2/2012
Brian Craig Miller argues that considering Hood through the lenses of manhood and memory--he calls his book a "cultural biography"--offers a fresh perspective on a Confederate who could have starred in a Greek tragedy...
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McKnight: CONFEDERATE OUTLAW (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 5/2/2012
This book is an excellent, well-written analysis that will become the standard biography of Champ Ferguson and will also be essential reading for those seeking insights into the motivations of borderland guerrillas...
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FOLLETT, FONER, JOHNSON (eds.): Slavery's Ghost (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/25/2012
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 by several persistent and important considerations in the historiography of slavery and emancipation.
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LOEWEN & SEBESTA (eds.): The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/25/2012
The book provides teachers and researchers alike with an invaluable archive of speeches, images, political papers, and memoirs that graphically reveal what the Confederacy and its post-war nostalgists actually believed about slavery, secession, race relations, and the whitewashing of the southern past.
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DELBLANCO: The Abolitionist Imagination (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/18/2012
Delbanco's stereotyping and judgmental essay strikes me as a demonstration of how old-fashioned liberalism can be turned into what amounts to morally-determined, preachy neo-conservatism, whether intentionally or not. I share Sinha's reaction that this is a condescending argument, written down from the Arcadian coolness of Morningside Heights...
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BARNHART: Albert Taylor Bledsoe (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/18/2012
Despite the limited material available, Barnhart has made a worthy and instructive effort to explore the significance of the man who became ?the architect of the Confederate interpretation of the conflict?...
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LOWRY: Drinking Patterns in the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/11/2012
Lowry's short, idiosyncratic text is premised on a central question: Did ethnic German and Irish soldiers exhibit abnormal drinking patterns when compared to average "American" troops?
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GALLMAN (ed.): A Tour of Reconstruction (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/4/2012
Gallman has made an important contribution by pulling Dickinson?s letters out of the archives?deciphering her difficult handwriting in the process?and making them more widely accessible. Her writing about Reconstruction can now join the ranks of other published travel writers of the period, such as Sidney Andrews and J.T. Trowbridge, while inserting a powerful female voice among them...
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STOKER: The Grand Design (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 4/4/2012
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 develop and implement an effective military strategy to achieve their respective political objectives? Rather than focusing on battles and campaigns, Stoker takes his readers on a fascinating tour of the big picture that offers...
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INSCOE (ed.): The Civil War in GeorgiaRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/28/2012
By definition a reference book such as this is not an exhaustive analysis of its subject, and the The Civil War in Georgia does not try to be. Those looking for a sophisticated, concise overview of Georgia?s role in the American Civil War, however, would do well to begin here.
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FULTON: The Reconstruction of Mark Twain (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/21/2012
This is not only a significant new take on Mark Twain and his significance as a public figure and political critic; it also provides new insights into the ambivalent legacy of the border state and western Civil War by viewing it through its impact on one of America?s most celebrated and enduring writers...
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HARRIS: Lincoln and the Border States (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/14/2012
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 serious, comprehensive look at the President's policies in the slaveholding states that remained in the Union...
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HIRSCH & VAN HAFTEN: Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/14/2012
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 rare occasion that somebody does think an original thought about him, the thinker (or in this case thinkers) deserve praise merely for the deed...
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LUBRECHT: New Jersey Butterfly Boys in the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/7/2012
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. The unit is an intriguing one that featured an ethnic mix of predominately German and Irish immigrants, as well as soldiers from more than a half dozen other European countries...
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MAGNESS & PAGE: Colonization After Emancipation (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 3/7/2012
Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page now show us that Lincoln’s interest was hardly furtive after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. It was real, and the president pursued colonization schemes with quiet and unobtrusive fervor...
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WITTENBERG: Gettysburg's Forgotten Cavalry ActionsRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/29/2012
Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions is a revised edition of cavalry expert Eric Wittenberg’s first book, published originally in 1998. As the full title suggests, Wittenberg focuses on three engagements that occurred on Gettysburg’s final day. This is the kind of book that academic historians ridicule, general Civil War readers find too narrow, and Gettysburg junkies embrace...
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Weird Essay WinnerRead More
Category: The Bookshelf Posted: 2/28/2012
This winning entry was submitted by Mr. Frank Gryzb of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, to The Civil War Monitor's "Weirding the War Essay Contest"?an event held in honor of Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges (edited by our own Dr. Stephen Berry).
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MARTEN (ed.): Children and Youth During the Civil War Era (2012)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/22/2012
By addressing so many fascinating topics in a regional or impressionistic manner, this anthology suggests as many new avenues for research as it satisfies. The authors and editor are to be commended for this valuable contribution to the field...
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BLIGHT: American Oracle (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/21/2012
In a sense, Blight’s new book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, is a continuation of the work he began in Race and Reunion. Rather than chronicle the myriad ways in which the Civil War Centennial intersected with the Civil Right Movement, Blight provides much more intimate portraits of four authors who wrestled with the legacy of the Civil War at the height of the Civil ...
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FARMER-KAISER: Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/15/2012
Mary Farmer-Kaiser’s study, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation, analyzes interactions between bureau agents and freedpersons, and local authorities in order to examine freedwomen’s active role in shaping both public policy and definitions of womanhood, manhood, and race...
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DAVIS & ROBERTSON (eds.): Virginia at War, 1865Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/15/2012
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 year of the war, unlike some of the earlier volumes; and while only 242 pages including preface and index, it is a meaty contribution to Civil War studies...
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ABRUZZO: Polemical Pain (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/8/2012
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 increasingly involved the burgeoning sectional crisis and its debate over slavery. Margaret Abruzzo centers this battle in her cross hairs as she outlines the origins, evolution, and disparate impacts of American...
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MARSHALL: Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/8/2012
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 Confederate Kentucky tells us exactly how that happened...
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WILSON: The Business of Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 2/1/2012
Readers will find Wilson’s deeply-researched account well worth the investment as a study of wartime political economy. It explores areas hitherto mostly neglected and rarely explored...
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GINGRICH (et al): The Battle of the Crater: A NovelRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/25/2012
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 of the Crater. Politics and marketing aside, how does the new book stand up within the genre of Civil War fiction? And what vision of the war emerges from its pages?
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BROWN (ed.): Remixing the Civil WarRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/18/2012
Touching on such diverse subjects as Barack Obama’s very recent deployment of the Lincoln image, current controversies over the Confederate battle flag, and contemporary black artists’ interpretations of the war, most of the essays in Remixing the Civil War offer rich analytical insights on how and why the Civil War continues to provide a critical touchstone for so many Americans in so many...
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Remembering Race and Reunion: Ten Years LaterRead More
Category: The Bookshelf Posted: 1/16/2012
It was—and remains—one of the most powerful meditations on the interior meaning of the conflict ever to have appeared in print. The book is ambitious, but not unwieldy; far-ranging, yet not comprehensive. Ten years later, I am still grappling with the book’s arguments, its theoretical underpinnings, and its explanatory power.
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DEMPSEY: Michigan and the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
In Michigan and the Civil War, Jack Dempsey examines his upper-Midwestern home state’s contribution to the North’s victory. If you are a native Wolverine and/or a Civil War buff with a keen interest in the state’s history, you will find much to like in the book. For more serious scholars, though, it will be less satisfying...
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RABLE: God's Almost Chosen Peoples (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
With its prodigious bibliography and its mandate to address the proliferation of faith in the primary sources, God’s Almost Chosen People will be a resource for and an invitation to students of both religion and the Civil War...
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KNIGHT: Confederate Invention (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
Almost all of the records of the Confederate States Patent Office burned with the evacuation of Richmond in 1865, but that did not prevent H. Jackson Knight from compiling this remarkable record of southern invention and inventors during the war. Confederate Invention stands as a testament to the dedication of this dogged researcher, who set out to write a history of Confederate patenting and,...
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SMITH: The Enemy Within (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/11/2012
Corruption in government and business remains a remarkably neglected aspect of the study of war. However, if the subject remains too elusive for serious discussion in the age of Haliburton, nailing it down in the Civil War years adds entire new layers...
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GAUGHAN: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 1/4/2012
Visitors who travel to pay their respects to the fallen and experience the beautiful monuments and closely manicured grounds of Arlington may be surprised to learn that the site itself was at the center of one of the most divisive political and legal battles of the post-Civil War period. The legal battle, which culminated in the Supreme Court case of U.S. v. Lee (1882) and the question of who...
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MAURO: A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia (2009)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/28/2011
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. This deceptively simple album is the topic of Charles V. Mauro’s most recent book, A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia: The Civil War Album of Laura Ratcliffe...
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GEIGER: Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/21/2011
Built on an impressive foundation of quantitative research, Financial Fraud makes major contributions to the fields of memory and guerrilla warfare in the Civil War. Though Geiger’s documentation of the fraudulent lending used to arm Confederate forces is quite the accomplishment, his work is truly dynamic, powerful, and contentious in his analysis of the unintended consequences and fallout from...
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PETERSEN: Quantrill at Lawrence (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/21/2011
Quantrill at Lawrence: The Untold Story is a well-written and provocative book... many will disagree with his conclusion that the Lawrence attack should be seen as a legitimate and successful cavalry raid...but readers will appreciate his storytelling and historians should give the contentions he makes in telling his untold story further consideration...
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WACHTELL: War No More (2010) Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/14/2011
Whitman's reluctance to reveal to his readers the totality of the "seething hell" of "the real war" he saw in the hospitals is at the heart of Cynthia Wachtell's War No More. Challenging modern authors such as Paul Fussell who view World War I as the watershed moment in the emergence of an antiwar tradition in American letters, Wachtell goes back to Whitman's "Secession war" to find its uncertain...
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THOMPSON (ed.): Tejanos in GrayRead More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 12/7/2011
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 individuals and the groups they represent have remained largely under the radar...
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MCGINTY: The Body of John Merryman (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/30/2011
But the Supreme Court played a more significant role in the Civil War than many historians have acknowledged; a state of affairs that Brian McGinty has been trying to rectify. He has followed his study of Lincoln and the Court with this superb book that assesses the many angles of Ex Parte Merryman, perhaps the most important case that reached any member of that tribunal during the war...
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URAL (ed.): Civil War Citizens (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/30/2011
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...
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HARROLD: Border War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/23/2011
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 a narrative focused on violence and ideological clash in the borderlands...
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MORSMAN: The Big House After Slavery (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/16/2011
Amy Feely Morsman’s The Big House After Slavery examines changing gender relations amongst married elites in postemancipation Virginia. Drawing from family papers, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals, Morsman argues that the dire economic straits of former slaveholding elites during Reconstruction prompted an important transition in the gender dynamics of planter households...
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COFFMAN: Going Back the Way They Came (2011) & MARTIN: I Will Give Them One More Shot (2011)Read More
Category: The Bookshelf Posted: 11/9/2011
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 in the ranks became a fascinating base for Catton’s award-winning, three-volume chronicle of the Union’s Army of the Potomac. That research breakthrough led to a veritable renaissance in the publication of...
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MARTIN: General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 11/2/2011
In this lengthy and well-researched new biography of Bragg, Samuel Martin attempts to rectify the Confederate general’s historical record and reputation. It is a commendable effort by the veteran author that will assuredly stir further debate and controversy...
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THOMAS: The Iron Way (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/26/2011
William G. Thomas’s The Iron Way is a tour-de-force, and offers a series of bracing insights about the origins, shape and outcome of the Civil War. Thomas argues that the railroads were sites and symbols of contested modernity in antebellum America. They did not simply symbolize northern industrial might and progress, but also the South’s determination to have modernity on its own terms: to...
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GLATTHAAR: Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/26/2011
Designed as a companion to his superb 2008 work General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse, the statistical volume breaks down the sample of six hundred soldiers that Glatthaar used to tell the story of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia...
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BYNUM: The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/19/2011
“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s latest book about the Civil War home front and its checkered aftermath bring previously ignored strains of political and social dissent back to life through an intricate...
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WOOD: Near Andersonville (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/19/2011
Peter Wood’s incisive new book asks us to set aside imagery of battles and soldiers, and even “Honest Abe,” so that we might visualize the world captured by the painter Winslow Homer in his long-forgotten masterpiece “Near Andersonville.”
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MARTEN: Sing Not War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/12/2011
More so than any previous historian, Marten sheds light on several important questions: how did veterans live, and how were they perceived by society? Sing Not War has given admirable shape and definition to an anemic subfield of Civil War history, and as such it is a welcome addition to the literature. Future studies of the war’s consequences must contend with the important questions that James...
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MCCURRY: Confederate Reckoning (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/12/2011
Confederate Reckoning’s sharp narrative and fresh analysis of the odds faced by slaveholders in the Confederacy and their contributions to its internal collapse is both timely and justified as historians try to reassess key issues of race and gender, such as the roles of southern women and slaves, in relation to the war. McCurry has opened the door for future scholarship and has further cemented...
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BERRY (ed.): Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 10/5/2011
The essays themselves explore nooks and crevices of Civil War history that are always interesting, sometimes poignant, and often revelatory. Berry’s introduction is especially cogent about the thread that runs through the collection: the “littleness” of the war. Almost certainly this view of the conflict is rooted in the experience of contemporary Americans with war. We have a half century...
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GOODHEART: 1861: The Civil War Awakening (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/28/2011
Adam Goodheart’s much heralded 1861: The Civil War Awakening is an eloquent, innovative, and deeply researched collection of chapter-length vignettes that surveys a variety of events at the outset of our national bloodletting...
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GALLAGHER: The Union War (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/28/2011
Ken Burns’s Civil War series made famous Rhode Island soldier Elisha Hunt Rhodes’s phrase, “All for the Union.” Gary W. Gallagher agrees with Rhodes. Gallagher emphasizes that, for northerners, the war was one for Union. Although he welcomes the flood of literature that has emphasized the importance of race, slavery, and emancipation to the Civil War, Gallagher believes that this focus has...
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A few words on The BookshelfRead More
Category: The Bookshelf Posted: 9/16/2011Greetings and welcome to the official digital headquarters of book reviews for The Civil War Monitor. In much the same way that printed editions of the Monitor will attempt to bridge the unfortunate chasm that still divides many professional scholars from broader historical audiences, this space, harnessing the infinite reach of the Internet, will attempt to charge that goal head on...
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BERTERA & CRAWFORD: The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War (2010)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/16/2011
Since the turn towards social and cultural history in the 1960s and 1970s, many academic institutions have relegated military history to the virtual back burner of “serious” scholarly endeavors. Military histories have, however, remained popular with general readers, and have recently regained scholarly credibility within academia. One reason for this has been a shift of focus from strategies....
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WARSCHAUER: Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival (2011)Read More
Category: Book Reviews Posted: 9/16/2011
The Civil War Centennial saw the publication of histories of state participation in the Civil War. Now, with the approach of the sesquicentennial, it appears as if a new batch of histories building upon the last 50 years of scholarship is on the way. Matthew Warshauer's Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival serves as a model of what a state-level survey of the ...
About This Blog
The Bookshelf is the digital home of book reviews and author interviews for the Monitor--and your source of the most up-to-date information on all things Civil War literature.
For information concerning book reviews, interviews, other book media-related requests, or general questions, please contact the Book Review Editor:
Matthew C. Hulbert
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