Published: 4/25/12Slavery’s Ghost (2011)By: Joshua D. RothmanCategory: Book Reviews 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: 4/18/12The Abolitionist Imagination (2012)By: Michael FellmanCategory: Book Reviews 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: 4/18/12Albert Taylor Bledsoe (2011)By: Benjamin CloydCategory: Book Reviews 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: 4/11/12Drinking Patterns in the Civil War (2011)By: Sean VanattaCategory: Book Reviews 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: 4/4/12The Grand Design (2010)By: Lorien FooteCategory: Book Reviews 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: 4/4/12A Tour of Reconstruction (2011)By: Amy Murrell TaylorCategory: Book Reviews 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: 3/28/12The Civil War in Georgia (2011)By: Keith MuchowskiCategory: Book Reviews 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: 3/21/12The Reconstruction of Mark Twain (2010)By: John C. InscoeCategory: Book Reviews 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: 3/14/12Abraham Lincoln and the Structure of Reason (2010)By: Brian DirckCategory: Book Reviews 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: 3/14/12Lincoln and the Border States (2011)By: George C. RableCategory: Book Reviews 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: 3/7/12Colonization After Emancipation (2011)By: Earl J. HessCategory: Book Reviews 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: 3/7/12New Jersey Butterfly Boys in the Civil War (2011)By: Scott ManningCategory: Book Reviews 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: 2/29/12Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions (2011)By: A. Wilson GreeneCategory: Book Reviews 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: 2/28/12Weird Essay WinnerBy: Frank GrzybCategory: Book Reviews 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: 2/22/12Children and Youth During the Civil War Era (2012)By: Catherine M. WrightCategory: Book Reviews 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: 2/21/12American Oracle (2011)By: David SilkenatCategory: Book Reviews 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,...
Published: 2/15/12Virginia at War, 1865By: Michael B. ChessonCategory: Book Reviews 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...
Published: 2/15/12Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau (2010)By: Carolyn ChesarinoCategory: Book Reviews “If women-whippers and negro shooters go unpunished in this section of the United States, it will be many years before the removal of the curse of military rule as it...
Published: 2/8/12Creating a Confederate Kentucky (2010)By: Anne Sarah RubinCategory: Book Reviews 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...
Published: 2/8/12Polemical Pain (2011)By: James Hill Welborn IIICategory: Book Reviews 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...