last reads

[War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era edited by Joan E. Cashin (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes index. Pages main/total:244/280. ISBN:978-1-4696-4320-5. $29.95] Within Civil War scholarship, material culture studies continue to be an undervalued academic sub-discipline, a state of affairs that the new essay anthology War Matters:

[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

[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,

[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

[Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North edited by Robert M. Sandow (Fordham University Press, 2018). Hardcover, notes, contributor list, index. 326 pp. ISBN:978-0-8232-7975-3. $65] Past proposals by historians that internal divisions were the primary cause of Confederate wartime defeat spawned an extensive literature related to Civil War loyalty and dissent. Though the

[The American Military: A Concise History by Joseph T. Glatthaar (Oxford University Press, 2018). Hardcover, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:137/152. ISBN:978-0-19-069281-0. $18.95] Even the most general history of the American military from Jamestown through today might easily fill several large volumes, but, remarkably, Joseph Glatthaar's The American Military: A Concise

[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

[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

[A Forgotten Front: Florida during the Civil War Era edited by Seth A. Weitz and Jonathan C. Sheppard (University of Alabama Press, 2018). Hardcover, map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 268 pp. ISBN:978-0-8173-1982-3. $39.95] Civil War Florida has been long dismissed as an isolated and thinly-populated front of little significance, but historical coverage has vastly improved in

[Iowa and the Civil War, Volume 1: Free Child of the Missouri Compromise 1850-1862 by Kenneth L. Lyftogt (Camp Pope Publishing, 2018). Hardcover, 12 maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:408/432. ISBN:978-1-929919-79-6. $40] A planned trilogy, Kenneth Lyftogt's Iowa and the Civil War will trace the history of the state's participation in the conflict*. The initial volume,

[The Diaries of Reuben Smith, Kansas Settler and Civil War Soldier edited by Lana Wirt Myers (University Press of Kansas, 2018). Softcover, maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:239/260. ISBN:978-0-7006-2623-6. $24.95] Housed at the Kansas Historical Society archive, the diaries and other writings of Englishman and naturalized U.S. citizen Reuben Smith are remarkable

[Reconstruction: A Concise History by Allen C. Guelzo (Oxford University Press, 2018). Hardcover, 11 illustrations, event timeline, notes, bibliography, index. 192 pp. ISBN:978-0-19-086569-6. $18.95] An octavo-sized volume containing roughly 130 pages of narrative, Allen Guelzo's Reconstruction: A Concise History is concise indeed. It's a chronologically arranged scholarly synthesis of the era