last reads

New Arrival: • A Fierce Glory: Antietam - The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery by Justin Martin (Da Capo, 2018). The exploration in books, essays, and articles of links between Lincoln and Antietam are probably second only to Gettysburg among the great battles of the war, but there's always room for another viewpoint. In A Fierce Glory, "Justin Martin, an acclaimed writer

New Arrival: • I Am Perhaps Dying: The Medical Backstory of Spinal Tuberculosis Hidden in the Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham by Dennis A. Rasbach, M.D. (Savas Beatie, 2018). Dennis Rasbach's I Am Perhaps Dying: The Medical Backstory of Spinal Tuberculosis Hidden in the Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham is a slim companion piece to The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of

[A Family and Nation under Fire: The Civil War Letters and Journals of William and Joseph Medill edited by Georgiann Baldino (Kent State University Press, 2018). Hardcover, maps, photos, notes, select source list, index. Pages main/total:xiii,209/245. ISBN:978-1-60635-336-3. $34.95] Edited by Georgiann Baldino, A Family and Nation under Fire is at its heart a collection of previously

New Arrival: • Mountain Feds: Arkansas Unionists and the Peace Society by James J. Johnston   (Butler Center for Ark Studies, 2018). As far as I know, James Johnston's Mountain Feds: Arkansas Unionists and the Peace Society is the first book that focuses entirely on the Society, its formation, its activities, and Confederate suppression measures. A loosely organized collection of

Though the Confederate Army of Tennessee had moments of success in the early stages of several battles and won a decisive (albeit pyrrhic) victory at Chickamauga, it is generally considered a dysfunctional mess than never lived up to its potential. Opinions regarding just what went wrong with the army have been offered in numerous books and articles over the years. Comparing the Army of the

New Arrival: • Military History of the West, Vol. 47 edited by Alex Mendoza (Univ of N Texas Press, 2018). Distributed by UNT Press, Military History of the West "is a peer-reviewed journal focused on scholarly study of western US military history, including the Mississippi Valley and all states west of that line. The journal features articles on the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, frontier

New Arrival: • Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered edited by Michael P. Gray   (KSU Press, 2018). In Crossing the Deadlines, editor Michael Gray has assembled nine essays representative of current trends in the Civil War prisons scholarship. It "crosses those boundaries of old scholarship by taking on bold initiatives with new methodologies, filling a void in the current

[Five or Ten Minutes of Blind Confusion: The Battle of Aiken, South Carolina, February 11, 1865 by Eric J. Wittenberg (Fox Run Publishing, 2018). Cloth hardcover, 5 maps, photos, footnotes, appendices, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vi,138/183. ISBN:978-1-945602-06-1. $26.95] While book-length studies of Civil War battles of all sizes abound in the literature, it's only been over the past

Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time by Michael Palin Vancouver: Greystone Books USD $28 Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada CDN $37 Reviewed by John Wilson In the past century and a half, dozens of books have been published dealing with the lost Franklin Expedition but only a few have stood the test of time—springing to mind are Richard Cyriax’s magisterial Sir John Franklin’s Last Arctic Expedition and David Woodman’s examination of the Inuit testimony, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery . Many are stylistically dated or poorly written or just plain weird, but for anyone wanting to add to the corpus of Franklin literature today, there is a much more dangerous pitfall—time. As Michael Palin puts it in Erebus , after Lieutenant Schwatka’s return from his exploration of King William Island in 1880, “The indignation that fuelled the search, the wounded national pride that gave it such imperative, and the appetite of newspapers…for the grisly detai...

I always look forward to the next volume in SIU Press's Civil War Campaigns in the West series (formerly the Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland series). Five books have been published so far, the most recent covering the Tennessee Campaign of 1864, and I've liked them all. We now have some solid intel regarding when we'll see the next one. The release of The Vicksburg Assaults, May 19–22, 1863

New Arrival: • At the Forefront of Lee's Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell's Road to Gettysburg by Robert J. Wynstra (KSU Press, 2018). In terms of treatment of enemy civilians and their property, tradition holds that on the whole the men of Lee's army behaved better than their northern counterparts. Reassessing this and other related topics is the new

New Arrival: • Decisions at Chattanooga: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle   by Larry Peterson (UT Press, 2018). It's clear to anyone reading my reviews of Decisions at Stones River (2018) and Decisions at Second Manassas (2018) that I am a fan of UT Press's new Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series, which offers readers a fresh way of dissecting major campaigns

[Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xi,184/284. ISBN:978-0-8061-6026-9. $32.95] Though many nineteenth-century Americans viewed the Desert Southwest as a danger-filled wasteland unworthy of national possession and

New Arrival: • Meade: The Price of Command, 1863–1865 by John G. Selby (KSU Press, 2018). Most Civil War army commanders have modern admirers and detractors, but reviews of George Gordon Meade's leadership qualities remain perhaps more mixed in nature than most. No one will dispute that Gettysburg was his finest moment and more recent assessments of his handling of the post-battle pursuit have

New Arrival: • My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife   Intro by Ron Chernow (Library of America, 2018). Found in all biographies of U.S. Grant is the determination that being a husband and father was at the very core of the man's being. Of course, Grant was hardly the only frontier army officer to experience intense longing for family and harbor serious doubts

Charles D. Collins, Jr. is a history professor at the U.S. Army's Combat Studies Institute and the author of a pair of military atlases covering the Cheyenne and Sioux wars. His new map and text study, Battlefield Atlas of Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 (2018), addresses one of the very largest, but at the same time least studied, Civil War campaigns fought in the Trans-Mississippi theater.

Over the past fifteen years, scholarly and popular appreciation of the Civil War career of Lew Wallace has undergone quite a transformation. General acceptance of commentary condemning, or even mocking, Wallace as the incompetent political general who was unconscionably "late" at Shiloh has been replaced by far more nuanced, and more positive, assessments of many aspects of the high-ranking

New Arrival: • The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War   by Joanne B. Freeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). Most people probably view the shocking caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner in 1856 as an exceptional act of violence perpetrated on Capitol Hill. However, Joanne Freeman's The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War shows

[Palmito Ranch: From Civil War Battlefield to National Historic Landmark by Jody Edward Ginn and William Alexander McWhorter (Texas A&M University Press, 2018). Flexbound softcover, 6 maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xvi,91/132. ISBN:978-1-62349-636-4. $26] In the realm of Texas Civil War battles, the two late-war engagements fought at Palmito Ranch

Practically every aspect of Abraham Lincoln's life has some legend or two attached to it, and one of the early ones associated with his role as Commander-in-Chief involved his famous, and arguably foolhardy, personal reconnaissance of Southside Virginia during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign. Upset with the pace of the campaign, an impatient Lincoln ordered that troops be landed on the south shore of