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: 6/27/12
John Brown Still Lives! (2011)
The catalysts, conduct, context, and consequences of the Civil War era continue to resonate through American intellectual and popular life. Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and to a lesser extent,...
Published: 6/20/12
The Revolution of 1861 (2012)
Perhaps the oldest and most out of favor interpretation of the American Civil War was formulated by Karl Marx who saw it as only one aspect of an international revolution...
Published: 6/20/12
Marching With Sherman (2012)
By now most accounts of Sherman’s war-altering campaigns across Georgia and then up through the Carolinas follow the same well-trod paths. Many books, like Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm, give...
Published: 6/13/12
Routes of War (2012)
Some changes in historical interpretation are driven by uncovering new sources. Others come as a consequence of new methods or new analytical interests. Still others derive more simply, from scholars...
Published: 6/6/12
Views from the Dark Side of American History (2011)
And there it was. The question I knew she would eventually ask, this undergraduate who writes for her campus newspaper. “So why did you become interested in the Civil War?”...
Published: 6/6/12
Battle Hymns (2012)
In Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War, Christian McWhirter analyzes the role music played in dividing the nation in 1860-1861, in sustaining civilian and...
Published: 5/30/12
With a Sword in One Hand… (2012)
New scholarship is most often produced through new interpretations of familiar evidence. Less often, historians discover and present genuinely new information. Even more rarely, scholars force us to completely reassess...
Published: 5/23/12
Second Manassas (2011)
The fighting around Manassas Junction in northern Virginia during the late summer of 1862 is often hailed by students of the Civil War as one of Confederate General Robert E....
Published: 5/16/12
The Allstons of Chicora Wood (2011)
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...
Published: 5/16/12
Ministers and Masters (2011)
Over the last several decades, scholars of the antebellum South have deepened our understanding of the influence of honor and masculinity on the region’s history. Their studies have not only...
Published: 5/9/12
A Secret Society History of the Civil War (2011)
When historians of the Civil War think about wartime “secret societies,” various fundamental questions commonly emerge: Who were these people? How numerous were they? What did they believe? What was...
Published: 5/2/12
CONFEDERATE OUTLAW (2011)
Scholarly interest in Civil War guerrillas has burgeoned over the past decade and, with the sesquicentennial in full swing, more guerrilla-related titles will likely roll off the presses in the...
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...