last reads

New Arrival: • "An Arch Rebel Like Myself": Dan Showalter and the Civil War in California and Texas by Gene C. Armistead and Robert D. Arconti (McFarland, 2018). Like many of his countrymen, Pennsylvania's Daniel Showalter moved to California for the opportunities it had to offer, eventually settling in Mariposa County.  A gold miner at one time, he also entered state politics. Despite his

During his 1862-63 series of operations aimed at capturing Vicksburg, the December 5, 1862 Battle of Coffeeville marked the farthest southern reach of U.S. Grant's initial overland advance into the heart of the Magnolia State along the axis of the Mississippi Central Railroad. It was a small affair pitting the Union army's cavalry vanguard under Colonel Theophilus Dickey against a larger mixed

New Arrival: • The Maps of Fredericksburg: An Atlas of the Fredericksburg Campaign, Including all Cavalry Operations, September 18, 1862 - January 22, 1863 by Bradley M. Gottfried (Savas Beatie, 2018). With the exception of David Powell's Chickamauga installment, all of the Civil War coverage from the Savas Beatie Military Atlas Series have been eastern theater titles from series creator Bradley

New Arrival: • Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War by Saxon T. Bisbee. (Univ of Ala Press, 2018). It seems like a long time since an interesting technology-related Civil War book arrived on the doorstep, and this one appears to be something right up my alley. Civil War ironclad designs intended for operations along the country's rivers and

[The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign by Timothy B. Smith (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). Cloth, 7 maps, photos, notes, biblio essay, index. Pages main/total:225/266. ISBN:978-0-8093-3666-1. $34.50] Though book-length coverage of many battles associated with the Union effort to capture Vicksburg between December 1862 and July 1863 remains spotty

New Arrival: • Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek. (Kent St Univ Press, 2018). Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons "confronts the enduring claim that Civil War military prisons represented an apocalyptic and a historical rupture in America’s otherwise linear and progressive

The commercial viability of the general catalog of Savas Beatie titles allows them to occasionally produce the limited print run, specialized reference books that they could never survive doing as their main calling. An example is Ray Sibley's Confederate Artillery Organizations (2014) and more recently Richard Sauers's The National Tribune Civil War Index (3 Vols.). The latest multi-volume set

New Arrival: • The American Military: A Concise History by Joseph T. Glatthaar (Oxford UP, 2018). In The American Military: A Concise History, Joseph Glaathaar undertakes the task of condensing American military history from Jamestown through today in around 125 pages of narrative. Descriptive accounts of America's wars are discussed in chronological order and organized under the umbrella of big

New Arrival: • An Antietam Veteran's Montana Journey: The Lost Memoir of James Howard Lowell edited by Katharine Seaton Squires (Arcadia Pub & The Hist Press, 2018). "In this recently unearthed memoir," edited by Katharine Seaton Squires and published as An Antietam Veteran's Montana Journey, "Civil War veteran James Howard Lowell offers a firsthand account of his brutal journey west on a wagon

[An Aide to Custer: The Civil War Letters of Lt. Edward G. Granger edited by Sandy Barnard & compiled by Thomas E. Singelyn (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). Hardcover, 10 maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. 316 pp. ISBN:978-0-8061-6018-4. $39.95] By the Civil War's second year, nineteen-year-old frustrated college dropout and aspiring lawyer Edward Granger of Grand Rapids, Michigan

New Arrival: • Decisions at Chickamauga: The Twenty-four Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle by Dave Powell with maps by David Friedrichs (UT Press, 2018). Dave Powell's Decisions at Chickamauga is the third volume from University of Tennessee Press's Command Decisions in America's Civil War series. You can find my positive reviews of the earlier titles covering Stones River and Second

New Arrival: • Under the Crescent Moon with the XI Corps in the Civil War, Volume 2: From Gettysburg to Victory, 1863-1865 by James S. Pula (Savas Beatie, 2018). James Pula's Under the Crescent Moon with the XI Corps in the Civil War, Volume 1: From the Defenses of Washington to Chancellorsville, 1862-1863 was published last year and this book completes the most in-depth history to date of the

Paul Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of well-received Civil War titles, among them Glory Was Not Their Companion: The Twenty-Sixth New York Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War (2005), He Hath Loosed the Fateful Lightning: The Battle of Ox Hill (Chantilly), September 1, 1862 (2003), Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer (2009), and "Old Slow Town": Detroit

New Arrival: • September Mourn: The Dunker Church of Antietam by Alann D. Schmidt & Terry W. Barkley (Savas Beatie, 2018). In the ranks of nondescript buildings that famous Civil War battles turned into legendary historical landmarks, Antietam's Dunker Church surely ranks near the top. However, according to Alann Schmidt and Terry Barkley's September Mourn: The Dunker Church of Antietam, "few

New Arrival: • How the West Was Drawn: Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West by David Bernstein (Univ of Neb Press, 2018). How the West Was Drawn "explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth

New Arrival: • The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign   by Timothy B. Smith (SIU Press, 2018). Most admirers of U.S. Grant's Civil War career agree that the Vicksburg Campaign was the general's masterpiece. Prolific western theater military historian Timothy Smith certainly seems to concur with this view, arguing that the campaign was the "showcase of

[Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Hardcover, notes, bibliography, index. 240 pp. ISBN:978-1-4696-3886-7. $32.95] The popular understanding of the general course of the American Civil War suggests that northern volunteers enlisted to save the Union, but when emancipation became an

New Arrival: • The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known: The North's Union Leagues in the American Civil War by Paul Taylor (Kent St Univ Press, 2018). Paul Taylor's The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known is the first full-length study of the Union Leagues. The book discusses at length the heavy influence that grassroots organization had on checking political inroads made by Peace

1. The Battle Of Carthage: Border War In Southwest Missouri by David C. Hinze and Karen Farnham (1997). Last time, a list of five essential Missouri State Guard reference books was presented. Today, we'll look at five representative studies of MSG operations in the field, listed in chronological order by event. Though Kenneth Burchett's more recent study of the July 5, 1861 Battle of Carthage

New Arrival: • An Aide to Custer: The Civil War Letters of Lt. Edward G. Granger edited by Sandy Barnard & compiled by Thomas E. Singelyn (OU Press, 2018). "In August 1862, nineteen-year-old Edward G. Granger joined the 5th Michigan Cavalry Regiment as a second lieutenant. On August 20, 1863, the newly promoted Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer appointed Granger as one of his aides, a position

New Arrival: • Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North edited by Robert M. Sandow (Fordham UP, 2018). In their wide-ranging exploration of the topic, the essays contained in Contested Loyalty move beyond partisan wrestling between northern Democrats and Republicans. Edited by Robert Sandow, the volume "examines the significance of loyalty across fault lines of gender,

[Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat by Jonathan M. Steplyk (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:244/304. ISBN:978-0-7006-2628-1. $29.95] The Civil War experience of combat has been discussed in depth by Gerald Linderman, Earl Hess, Brent Nosworthy, and others, but Jonathan Steplyk's