The Bookshelf

Nelson examines destruction squarely and without flinching. She has undertaken remarkable primary research and offers powerful stories as well as revealing interpretations of images...

In under 150 pages, Dirck delivers. Lincoln and the Constitution is a rich, creative, and utterly readable rendering of the development of Abraham Lincoln's constitutional theory from which scholars, too, can benefit...

The Jewish experience during the Civil War has often been ignored or side-stepped by both Civil War historians and historians of American Jewish history. Thankfully, with the publication of Jews and the Civil War, editors Jonathan Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn have put together a collection of seminal previously published works on this topic...

For years, historians have found the diary of Second Lieutenant John Edward Dooley, of Company C of the First Virginia Infantry Regiment, a valuable resource...

Richard Newman and James Mueller's Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia assembles a collection of insightful scholarly essays pivoting Philadelphia as the ideological, legislative, and social activist epicenter of the national abolitionist movement from the revolutionary era to the outbreak of the Civil War...

All in all, Wills has made a fine contribution to Civil War studies with this biography of a comparatively understudied but profoundly important Union general...

Constance Cary Harrison's accounts of Civil War Richmond have supplied many a historian with an insider?s view of life in the Confederate capital... her memoir reveals a young woman on the cusp of maturity recounting a life she never expected to endure...

While heavy on military details, The Intimate Civil War Letters of Lt. J.A.H. Foster will also be of interest to social, gender, family, and local historians, as well as genealogists. The collection offers uncommon insight into sexuality in the period as well...

A simply terrific researcher, Emerson has unearthed a breathtaking array of unknown facts and quotes about Robert, and has crafted this avalanche of detail into a truly absorbing account of his long life and times...

This book, with its focus on the perpetuated Lincoln myth through the recounting of his death and the obsession with the trial of the assassination conspirators, tells not only about the man himself, but also how he defined the American character and how he continues to influence American political values.