last reads

[The Battle of Ball's Bluff: All the Drowned Soldiers by Bill Howard (Arcadia Publishing and The History Press, 2018). Softcover, 10 maps, photos, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:140/189. ISBN:978-1-4671-4073-7. $23.99] The October 21, 1861 Battle of Ball's Bluff, a Confederate victory in Virginia that decisively crowned that year's string of early-war

New Arrival: • War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era edited by Joan E. Cashin   (UNC Press, 2018). The use of objects to open historical discussion and inspire imagination has always been around in the museum setting, but the practice has increased in popularity of late among a variety of other learning outlets, included books and podcasts. This idea that things you can see and/or

New Arrival: • Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South   by Diane Miller Sommerville (UNC Press, 2018). It's probably safe to say that a 450-page book about psychological suffering and suicide in the stricken South is not on the Christmas list of too many Civil War readers, but it is an important, understudied social and cultural topic that Diane Sommerville's

New Arrival: • Movements and Positions in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain: The Memoir of Colonel James T. Holmes, 52d Ohio Volunteer Infantry by James T. Holmes, edited by Garth D. Bishop, with intro. and annotations by Mark A. Smith (McFarland, 2018). Written in 1915 and published for the first time in the pages of Movements and Positions in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain: The Memoir of

[Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War by Earl J. Hess (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Hardcover, 19 maps, 3 tables, photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xvi,294/417. ISBN:978-1-4696-4342-7. $45] The publication of the third and final piece of Earl Hess's acclaimed eastern theater field fortifications trilogy1 back in 2009

New Arrival: • Lincoln's Mercenaries: Economic Motivation Among Union Soldiers During the Civil War   by William Marvel (LSU Press, 2018). Ever since Bell Wiley pioneered serious study of the common soldiers of the Civil War, enlistment motivation has been explored in innumerable books, parts of books, and articles. By now, all possible reasons for joining the Union and Confederate armies have

New Arrival: • The Battle of Ball's Bluff: All the Drowned Soldiers by Bill Howard   (Arcadia Pub & The Hist Press, 2018). Four book-length Ball's Bluff studies exist, the most thorough among them James Morgan's treatment, which was republished in a "revised and expanded" edition in 2011. Bill Howard's The Battle of Ball's Bluff: All the Drowned Soldiers is another new edition of an earlier work

Back at the beginning of the month, I decided I would try something fun and different by recommending a list of Civil War horror movies for those wanting to fill gaps in their own 31 Days of Halloween marathon. I wanted to only include ones that I actually liked and believed before diving in that it would be possible to come up with 5-10. Unfortunately, the list (if we can even call it that)

New Arrival: • Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South by Loren Schweninger (Oxford UP, 2018). "(D)rawing from more than 2,000 suits and from the testimony of more than 4,000 plaintiffs from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War," Loren Schweninger's Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South offers readers the "first comprehensive study" of the use of courtrooms all across the

New Arrival: • Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War edited by Andrew S. Bledsoe & Andrew F. Lang (LSU Press, 2018). At least in the academic world, the intellectual utility of studying the most foundational elements of Civil War military history and science (i.e. soldiers, generals, battles, strategy, tactics, logistics, etc.) remains an oddly

[At the Forefront of Lee's Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell's Road to Gettysburg by Robert J. Wynstra (Kent State University Press, 2018). Cloth, maps, photos, illust., notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,266/347. ISBN:978-1-60635-354-7. $49.95] Robert Wynstra's At the Forefront of Lee's Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures

New Arrival: • Major General George H. Sharpe and the Creation of American Military Intelligence in the Civil War by Peter G. Tsouras (Casemate, 2018). Though mostly mocked for his role in framing General McClellan's inflated estimates of enemy troop strength in the East, Alan Pinkerton is probably the most well-known Union military intelligence chief. However, the man who proved most effective

Accustomed to viewing surrender in wartime as involving a pretty dire set of circumstances (at the very least putting the prisoner-of-war out of action for the duration of the conflict), modern readers new to Civil War studies are probably surprised at how readily and often Civil War soldiers gave up in such large numbers and with such frequently transient consequences (ex. instant parole) to

New Arrival: • In Memory of Self and Comrades: Thomas Wallace Colley's Recollections of Civil War Service in the 1st Virginia Cavalry edited by Michael K. Shaffer (UT Press, 2018). In Memory of Self and Comrades: Thomas Wallace Colley's Recollections of Civil War Service in the 1st Virginia Cavalry is the latest volume from UT Press's long-running series Voices of the Civil War. From the

[Mountain Feds: Arkansas Unionists and the Peace Society by James J. Johnston (Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2018). Softcover, maps, photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:200/305. ISBN:978-1-945624-12-4. $24.95] Contemporary source limitations will always inhibit modern efforts to record the full history of secret societies associated with the American Civil War,

New Arrival: • Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future   by Jason Phillips (Oxford UP, 2018). In his new book Looming Civil War, historian Jason Phillips asks a question not often considered at length, namely "(h)ow did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened?" Of course, this assumes that a sizable spectrum of citizens not only believed that some great

New Arrival: • River of Death-The Chickamauga Campaign, Volume 1: The Fall of Chattanooga   by William Glenn Robertson (UNC Press, 2018). In the many years that have passed since the Centennial publication of Glenn Tucker's Chickamauga, follow-up coverage of the battle (from Cozzens, Woodworth, and others) has been infrequent at best. Fortunately, this extended period of neglect has been

John G. Selby is a professor of history at Roanoke College and the author of Civil War Talks: Further Reminiscences of George S. Bernard and His Fellow Veterans (2012) and Virginians at War: The Civil War Experiences of Seven Young Confederates (2002). His latest book is Meade: The Price of Command, 1863–1865 (KSU Press, 2018), which seeks to challenge the prevailing view of George Gordon Meade

The number of hours spent maintaining CWBA on a weekly basis represents more than a part-time job. I keep doing it because I have a deep passion for Civil War history and the books, past and present, that constitute our fund of knowledge. Every year, I look forward to new titles with keen anticipation. That said, I rely on small revenue streams that help, among other things, to justify the

Though Grant-Sherman adherents would surely beg to differ, I think you could make a strong argument that the close collaboration between Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (as short-lived as it proved to be) overcame a rocky beginning during the Seven Days to become the war's premier command partnership. The news that Christian Keller's The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson,

New Arrival: • To Hazard All: A Guide to the Maryland Campaign, 1862 by Robert Orrison & Kevin R. Pawlak (Savas Beatie, 2018). Most of the Emerging Civil War titles have a short tour of some kind that is either integrated into the main narrative or presented as a separate component. In Orrison and Pawlak's To Hazard All: A Guide to the Maryland Campaign, 1862, the tour is the book. Actually it

New Arrival: • Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War by Earl J. Hess   (UNC Press, 2018). When Earl Hess completed his highly-regarded eastern theater fortifications trilogy [Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861-1864 (2005), Trench Warfare under Grant and Lee: Field Fortifications in the Overland Campaign (2007), and In

New Arrival: • The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln: A Day-by-Day Account of His Personal, Political, and Military Challenges by David Alan Johnson (Prometheus Books, 2018). With existing works from Starr, Trudeau, Harris, Reck and probably more I don't know about, the last hours, days, weeks, and months of Abraham Lincoln's life and presidency have been pretty popular book-length topics of study

[Decisions at Chattanooga: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle by Larry Peterson (University of Tennessee Press, 2018). Softcover, 24 maps, 13 photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xv,85/191. $29.95] In 2018 alone, University of Tennessee Press has released the first four volumes of its unique Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series, which