Published: 2/1/12WILSON: The Business of Civil War (2010)By: Brooks D. SimpsonCategory: Book Reviews The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-1865 by Mark R. Wilson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Paper, ISBN: 080189820X. $25.00. At its core, Mark R. Wilson’s volume...
Published: 1/25/12The Battle of the Crater: A Novel (2011)By: Craig A. WarrenCategory: Book Reviews 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...
Published: 1/18/12Remixing the Civil War (2011)By: Nina SilberCategory: Book Reviews Who could have anticipated that, by the early years of the 21st century, America’s bloodiest military conflict might be re-imagined in the form of a photograph of nine smiling Lincoln...
Published: 1/16/12Remembering Race and Reunion: Ten Years LaterBy: Brian Matthew JordanCategory: Book Reviews There are four copies of David W. Blight’s magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory on the bookshelves lining my study, each replete with eager (and sometimes skeptical)...
Published: 1/11/12The Enemy Within (2011)By: Mark A. LauseCategory: Book Reviews Corruption in government and business remains a remarkably neglected aspect of the study of war. The unstated assumption behind this relative unconcern regards these impacts as collateral damage unworthy of...
Published: 1/11/12Confederate Invention (2011)By: KNIGHT: Confederate Invention (2011)Category: Book Reviews Students of the American Civil War continue to make something out of very little. Almost all of the records of the Confederate States Patent Office burned with the evacuation of...
Published: 1/11/12God’s Almost Chosen Peoples (2010)By: Abigail CooperCategory: Book Reviews “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people,” Lincoln told an audience...
Published: 1/11/12Michigan and the Civil War (2011)By: Brian Allen DrakeCategory: Book Reviews The North may have won the Civil War, but the South has captured most of its historiography. Since the vast bulk of the fighting took place there, and since slavery—the...
Published: 1/4/12The Last Battle of the Civil War (2011)By: Kevin M. LevinCategory: Book Reviews Americans were recently shocked to learn that an unknown number of servicemen and women were buried in the wrong plots at Arlington National Cemetery. The gross negligence involved stands in...
Published: 12/28/11A Southern Spy in Northern Virginia (2009)By: Angela Esco ElderCategory: Book Reviews 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. “Presented to Miss Laura Ratcliffe,”...
Published: 12/21/11Quantrill at Lawrence (2011)By: A. James FullerCategory: Book Reviews Quantrill at Lawrence: The Untold Story is a well-written and provocative book that ultimately falls short of its goal. William Clarke Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in August 1863,...
Published: 12/21/11Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War (2010)By: Joseph M. Beilein, Jr.Category: Book Reviews Those who pay attention to the world of Civil War history are well aware that Mark W. Geiger’s recent work, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861-1865,...
Published: 12/14/11War No More (2010)By: Kenneth W. NoeCategory: Book Reviews Even the most casual student of the Civil War frequently encounters Walt Whitman’s canonical statement from Specimen Days that “the real war will never get in the books.” While historians of the...
Published: 12/7/11Tejanos in Gray (2011)By: William L. SheaCategory: Book Reviews 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...
Published: 11/30/11Civil War Citizens (2010)By: James J. BroomallCategory: Book Reviews 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....
Published: 11/30/11The Body of John Merryman (2011)By: Michael S. GreenCategory: Book Reviews Among the battles that Abraham Lincoln fought to restore the Union—against the Confederacy, against the opposition party, against members of his own party—his dealings with the Supreme Court and Chief...
Published: 11/23/11Border War (2010)By: Bonnie Laughlin-SchultzCategory: Book Reviews 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...
Published: 11/16/11The Big House After Slavery (2010)By: Felicity TurnerCategory: Book Reviews Amy Feely Morsman’s The Big House After Slavery examines changing gender relations among married elites in post-emancipation Virginia. Drawing from family papers, diaries, newspapers, and periodicals, Morsman argues that the...
Published: 11/9/11Going Back the Way They Came (2011) & I Will Give Them One More Shot (2011)By: James I. Robertson Jr.Category: Book Reviews 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...
Published: 11/2/11General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A. (2011)By: Jeffry D WertCategory: Book Reviews A consensus among many Civil War historians is that the Confederacy lost the conflict in the West, the vast region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Union armies...