last reads

New Arrival: • Five or Ten Minutes of Blind Confusion: The Battle of Aiken, South Carolina, February 11, 1865 by Eric J. Wittenberg (Fox Run Pub, 2018). For a long time, Civil War readers interested in the closing months of the war in the Carolinas had little to take in beyond John Barrett's Centennial-era classic The Civil War in North Carolina. This changed in a big way just over twenty years

New Arrival: • The Union Cavalry and the Chickamauga Campaign by Dennis W. Belcher   (McFarland, 2018). With now four related studies under his belt, Dennis Belcher is rapidly becoming one of the leading authorities on the mounted forces (in particular the Union cavalry) that operated in the Confederate heartland during the Civil War. Though I didn't have the chance to read his biography of

Regular readers know that I frequently complain about how the 1862 Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days fighting continue to be neglected in comparison to other eastern theater campaigns of similar stature. My immediate reaction to seeing early notice of The Vermont Brigade in the Seven Days: The Battles and Their Personal Aftermath by Paul G. Zeller (McFarland, 2019) was "Great!," but then I

[The Last Siege: The Mobile Campaign, Alabama 1865 by Paul Brueske (Casemate, 2018). Hardcover, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiii,185/278. ISBN:978-1-61200-631-4. $32.95] Involving 45,000 Union troops opposed by perhaps little more than 8,000* Confederate defenders, the 1865 Mobile Campaign was a major late-war military operation with considerable drama that

New Arrival: • Confederate Prisoners at Fort Delaware: The Legend of Mistreatment Reexamined   by Joel D. Citron (McFarland, 2018). It's a certainty that Civil War POW camps were not pleasant places to pass the time until release through either exchange or war's end, and ever since accusations have flown back and forth over whose prisons were worse in their treatment of those held there. Books

As much as I like Ninety-Eight Days (UT Press, 2000) from the late geologist Warren Grabau (it's my second favorite Vicksburg Campaign book after the Bearss trilogy), the innovative promise of the "geographer's view" aspect of Grabau's campaign study ended up being pretty limited in scope (or at least that's what I recall). Overall, while I appreciated its soil analysis and other "topographic and

New Arrival: • General Lee’s Immortals: The Battles and Campaigns of the Branch-Lane Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 by Michael C. Hardy (Savas Beatie, 2018). In his recent magazine review of the hardcover first edition of Hardy's General Lee’s Immortals, the elder Krick, who has forgotten more ANV sources than anyone else has ever known about in the first place, delivered