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Booknotes: The Calculus of Violence

New Arrival: • The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Harvard UP, 2018). The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War represents yet another call to scrap the traditional interpretation of the Civil War's violence and destruction as a linear progression from conciliation/limited war to hard/total war. Instead, author Aaron Sheehan-Dean
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Booknotes: High Private

New Arrival: • High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865 edited by Mary M. Cronin (UT Press, 2018). Mary Cronin's High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865 explores the life, military service, and journalistic career of Vermont-raised but passionately Confederate Rensselaer Reed Gilbert (the book's title
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Booknotes: The War for the Common Soldier

New Arrival: • The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael (UNC Press, 2018). While there's no particular shortage of books describing and interpreting the experiences of Civil War soldiers in camp, on the march, and on the battlefield, new ideas and perspectives are always welcome. Central to Peter Carmichael's new book The
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Booknotes: Deep in the Piney Woods

New Arrival: • Deep in the Piney Woods: Southeastern Alabama from Statehood to the Civil War, 1800–1865 by Tommy C. Brown (Univ of Ala Press, 2018). Scholarly trends in Civil War home front studies are always in flux and that rarely results in the various sub-regions within states being accorded equal coverage. For Alabama, the recent explosion of Southern Unionist scholarship has diverted much
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Review - "Fort Snelling and the Civil War" by Stephen Osman

[Fort Snelling and the Civil War by Stephen E. Osman (Ramsey County Historical Society, 2017). Paperback, 7 maps, 100+ photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xii,295/335. ISBN:978-0-934294-76-8. $27] Established in the early 1800s on treaty land acquired from the Dakota, Fort St. Anthony (renamed Fort Snelling in honor of Col. Josiah Snelling of the 5th U.S.
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Book News: Leonidas Polk

It doesn't take new Civil War readers long before they are confronted with the stark contrast between the stability and effectiveness of the Confederate high command structure in the East and the self-defeating constant flux and dysfunction embodied in the top leadership in the western theater. In the context of western Confederate generals who occupied high command positions for a long enough
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Booknotes: Brothers in Valor

New Arrival: • Brothers in Valor: Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor by Robert F. Jefferson, Jr. (Lyons Pr, 2018). "Since the American Civil War, scores of African Americans have served with great distinction. Through thousands of historical accounts, photographs, and documentary evidence," Robert Jefferson's Brothers in Valor "introduces the 89 black
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