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