The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction

by Mark E., Jr. Neely

From the publisher:
The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century slaughter and carnage. In challenging this view, Mark E. Neely, Jr., considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limits that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen.

Neely begins by contrasting Civil War behavior with U.S. soldiers' experiences in the Mexican War of 1846. He examines Price's Raid in Missouri for evidence of deterioration in the restraints imposed by the customs of war; and in a brilliant analysis of Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign, he shows that the actions of U.S. cavalrymen were selective and controlled. The Mexican war of the 1860s between French imperial forces and republicans provided a new yardstick for brutality: Emperor Maximilian's infamous Black Decree threatened captured enemies with execution. Civil War battles, however, paled in comparison with the unrestrained warfare waged against the Plains Indians. Racial beliefs, Neely shows, were a major determinant of wartime behavior.

Destructive rhetoric was rampant in the congressional debate over the resolution to avenge the treatment of Union captives at Andersonville by deliberately starving and freezing to death Confederate prisoners of war. Nevertheless, to gauge the events of the war by the ferocity of its language of political hatred is a mistake, Neely argues. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's "total war" and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.

Love amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion

by Donald C. Elder

From the publisher:
“The letters of William and Mary Vermilion provide a unique glimpse into the changes the war inflicted on men, women, and family relationships . . . [they] offer a rich discussion of the politics of the home front in two states as well as the progress of military action, expecially in the Western theatre. . . . This is a welcome complement to the literature on the Civil War’s impact on gender and marriage.”—Choice

“What a find! This remarkable cache of Civil War letters reveals a companionate marriage of two literate, caring individuals who explore the meaning of their love and the meaning of the war that has separated them. Well illustrated and well documented, the book's pages take the reader from honesty and sensitivity to disappointment and despair. Elder proves that historical documents can be more compelling than fiction.” —Glenda Riley, Alexander M. Bracken Professor, Ball State University

William Vermilion (1830-1894) served as a captain in Company F of the 36th Iowa Infantry from October 1862 until September 1865. Although he was a physician in Iconium in south central Iowa at the start of the war, after it ended he became a noted lawyer in nearby Centerville; he was also a state senator from 1869 to 1872. Mary Vermilion (1831-1883) was a schoolteacher who grew up in Indiana; she and William married in 1858. In this volume historian Donald Elder pro-vides a careful selection from the hundreds of supportive, informative, and heart-wrenching letters that they wrote each other during the war—the most complete collection of letters exchanged between a husband and a wife during the Civil War.

Donald Elder is professor of history and chair of the department at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. He is also the editor of A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton (Iowa, 1998) and author of Out from behind the Eight-Ball: The History of Project Echo.

Iowa's Forgotten General: Matthew Mark Trumbull and the Civil War

by Kenneth L. Lyftogt

From the publisher:
Matthew Mark Trumbull was a Londoner who immigrated at the age of twenty. Within ten years of his arrival in America, he had become a lawyer in Butler County, Iowa; two years later a member of the state legislature; and two years after that a captain in the Union Army. By the end of the Civil War, he was a brevet brigadier general, and in his later years he was an author and lecturer. Kenneth Lyftogt’s biography details the amazing life of this remarkable man, also shedding light on the histories of the Third Iowa Volunteer Infantry and the Ninth Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.

Kenneth Lyftogt is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Northern Iowa. He has walked all the major battlefields of the Civil War and participated in reenactments. He is editor of Left for Dixie and the author of From Blue Mills to Columbia: Cedar Falls and the Civil War (Iowa, 1993) and the novel Road Freaks of Trans-Amerika.

Seventh Rhode Island Infantry in the Civil War

by Robert Grandchamp

From the publisher:
With over an 80 percent casualty rate by the war’s end, the Seventh Rhode Island participated in some of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. From its muster in the fall of 1862 through the death of the Seventh’s last surviving veteran in 1939, this regimental history records the story of the Seventh Rhode Island, a regiment which was among the last of the three years’ volunteers. Compiled primarily from firsthand sources such as letters and diaries, it follows the Seventh from Providence, Rhode Island, through the swamps of the Mississippi to the grueling Overland Campaign, providing a gripping historical narrative in the words of those who were actually present.

Appendices contain a list of casualties suffered by the regiment, a detailed Role of Honor and a division of enlistments by town. Period photographs, portraits and sketches complete this fascinating tale of the Seventh Rhode Island.

Robert Grandchamp is the author of numerous articles on Rhode Island’s Civil War past. A student at Rhode Island College in Providence. he resides in Warwick.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina and the Civil War: A History of Battle and Occupation

by Alex Christopher Meekins

From the publisher:
An account of a little-known theater of the Civil War.

In February of 1862, a Union naval force captured Elizabeth City. This fascinating history characterizes the overall situation in the notheastern North Carolina, where secessionists and Union sympathizers tangled right up until the Battle of Appomattox.

The First Louisiana Special Battalion: Wheat’s Tigers in the Civil War

by Gary Schreckengost

From the publisher:
From the little-known Filibuster Wars to the Civil War battlefield of Gaines’ Mill, this volume details the fascinating story of one of the South’s most colorful military units, the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion, aka Wheat’s Tigers.

Beginning with a brief look at the Filibuster Wars (a set of military attempts to annex Latin American countries into the United States as slave states), the work takes a close look at the men who comprised Wheat’s Tigers: Irish immigrant ship hands, New Orleans dock workers and Filibuster veterans. Commanded by one of the greatest antebellum filibusterers, Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, the Tigers quickly distinguished themselves in battle through their almost reckless bravery, proving instrumental in Southern victories at the battles of Front Royal, Winchester and Port Republic. An in-depth look at Battle of Gaines’ Mill, in which Wheat’s Tigers suffered heavy casualties, including their commander, completes the story.

Appendices provide a compiled roster of the Wheat’s Tigers, a look at the 1st Louisiana’s uniforms and a copy of Wheat’s report about the Battle of Manassas. Never-before-published photographs are also included.

Author and historian Gary Schreckengost lives in Elm, Pennsylvania. An infantry officer in the Army Reserves, his work has been published in American Civil War Magazine, World War II Magazine, Field Artillery Journal and Armor Magazine.

On Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War

by Anthony W. Lee

From the publisher:
Soon after Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book was published, in 1866, it became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers, then and in subsequent generations, would come to know the war.

Gardner's classic also became foundational in the history of American photography, combining, for the first time, words and images in a sophisticated and moving account. This book, written by the art historian Anthony W. Lee and the literary scholar Elizabeth Young, interprets the story of the war as told by Gardner, unraveling his careful choice of words and images and the complicated play between them, and understanding them against the backdrop of the literary and photographic cultures of the American antebellum and Reconstruction eras.

This book presents a unique study of a pivotal American historical document, approaching it from the perspective of visual studies as well as American literature and history.

"Lee and Young have admirably elucidated this foundational volume in the history of American photography by developing references that emerge from prior readings of these images, as well as thoughtfully producing new ways of seeing the landscapes Gardner presents. The book makes available to a wide audience one of the most important photographic records of any war and certainly the most interesting visual record of the American Civil War. This is superior scholarship."--Shirley Samuels, author of Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War

Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio

by Robert F. Engs

From the publisher:
Many of the farm families in the river country of southern Ohio sent fathers, husbands, and sons to fight and die in the Civil War. Few families have bequeathed a record of that experience as remarkable as that created by the Evans Family: an extraordinary collection of letters that offers a unique portrait of life both on the homefront and on the frontlines.

From his homestead near Ripley on the Ohio River, patriarch Andrew Evans sent two sons to war, and from 1862 to 1866, father and sons wrote each other hundreds of letters. Called 'the soldier's letters" by the family, this cache lay untouched in a barn until the 1980s, when Robert Engs was invited to edit them. Here are 273 family letters, most between Andrew and son Samuel, that draw us into the complicated lives of a Midwestern family not just suffering the dislocations of war, but also experiencing-and describing in intimate detail-the sorrows and occasional joys of rural life in 19th century America.

From the frontlines with the 70th Ohio and, later, as an officer commanding a unit of "colored troops," Samuel writes of the horrors of Shiloh, of the loneliness and fear patrolling Union lines in Tennessee. Andrew writes of the seasons of rural life, of illness and deaths in the family, of the complicated politics of this borderland where abolitionists and "Copperhead" pro-slavery voices shared daily debates. One of the very few collections of Civil War letters from homefront and frontlines, this meticulously edited book is an engrossing chronicle of war and peace, family and country, and an indispensable addition to the history of the Civil War.

Robert F. Engs is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His other books include Educating the Disenfranchised: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1939-1893; Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia; and, with Randall E. Miller, The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation.

A Damned Iowa Greyhound: The Civil War Letters of William Henry Harrison Clayton

by Donald C. Elder III

From the publisher:
William Henry Harrison Clayton was one of nearly 75,000 soldiers from Iowa to join the Union ranks during the Civil War. Possessing a high school education and superior penmanship, Clayton served as a company clerk in the 19th Infantry, witnessing battles in the trans-Mississippi theater. His diary and his correspondence with his family in Van Buren County form a unique narrative of the day-to-day soldier life as well as an eyewitness account of critical battles and a prisoner-of-war camp.

Clayton participated in the siege of Vicksburg and took part in operations against Mobile, but his writings are unique for the descriptions he gives of lesser-known but pivotal battles of the Civil War in the West. Fighting in the Battle of Prairie Grove, the 19th Infantry sustained the highest casualties of any federal regiment on the eld. Clayton survived that battle with only minor injuries, but he was later captured at the Battle of Stirling's Plantation and served a period of ten months in captivity at Camp Ford, Texas.

Clayton's writing reveals the complicated sympathies and prejudices prevalent among Union soldiers and civilians of that period in the country's history. He observes with great sadness the brutal effects of war on the South, sympathizing with the plight of refugees and lamenting the destruction of property. He excoriates draft evaders and Copperheads back home, conveying the intra-sectional acrimony wrought by civil war. Finally, his racist views toward blacks demonstrate a common but ironic attitude among Union soldiers whose efforts helped lead to the abolition of slavery in the United States.

From CWBN:
This is the paper edition of an earlier hardback release.

Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility

by Jason Phillips

From the publisher:
Insight into the mindset of the Confederacy’s most unyielding soldiers

Well into the final months of the Civil War, countless Confederate soldiers earnestly believed that victory lay just around the corner. How could this be? Jason Phillips reveals the deeply ingrained attitudes that shaped the reality of these diehards not only during the war but in the subsequent era, when the myth of the Lost Cause was born.

Much is known about what Confederate soldiers fought for; far less is understood about why they fought on despite long odds and terrible costs. Drawing on soldiers’ letters and diary entries from 1863 to 1865, Diehard Rebels explains how religious dogma and perceptions of Union barbarity and ineptitude affirmed in many soldiers a view of an indomitable South. Within the soldiers’ closely circumscribed world, other elements reinforced convictions that the South was holding its own against great but surmountable odds. Close comradeship and disorienting combat conditions were factors, says Phillips, as well as conclusions drawn from images and experiences contradicting the larger reality, such as battlefields littered with enemy corpses and parade-ground spectacles of Confederate military splendor.

Troops also tended to perceive the course of the war in far-off theaters, the North, and overseas in positive ways. In addition, diehards were both consumers and conduits of rumors, misinformation, and propaganda that allowed them to envision a war that was rosier than the truth but still believable. Instead of crippling diehards after defeat, old notions of southern superiority helped them uphold southern honor. The central elements of Confederate invincibility fueled white southern defiance after surrender and evolved into the Lost Cause.

Jason Phillips is an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University. He has also taught at Texas A&M University.

From Blue Mills to Columbia: Cedar Falls and the Civil War

by Kenneth L. Lyftogt

From the publisher:
Historian Kenneth Lyftogt introduces us to the volunteer soldiers of the Pioneer Grays and Cedar Falls Reserves infantry companies and in turn examines Iowa’s role in the Civil War. Many of these soldiers served the Union for the duration of the war, from the early fighting in Missouri to Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Sherman’s destructive marches through Georgia and the Carolinas. Their letters home are Lyftogt’s primary sources, as are editorials and articles published in the Cedar Falls Gazette.

Kenneth Lyftogt is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Northern Iowa. He has walked all the major battlefields of the Civil War and participated in reenactments. He is editor of Left for Dixie and the author of Iowa's Forgotten General: Matthew Mark Trumbull and the Civil War (Iowa, 2007) and the novel Road Freaks of Trans-Amerika.

Courage Under Fire: Profiles in Bravery from the Battlefields of the Civil War

by Wiley Sword

From the publisher:
Through diaries and letter written on the battlefield, in camps, and on the deathbeds of soldiers from north and south, Wiley Sword writes about more than the Civil War. He writes of the complex working of a soldier’s mind coming to grips with life and death in a time when his country was at war with itself.

On Aug. 3, 1864, Illinois Lieutenant Frank Curtiss was ordered by his commander to take the 127th Illinois Infantry into a charge of the fortified Rebel lines. He knew certain death was in store for him and his men. He also knew little tactical superiority would be gained for lives lost and refused to do it.

Confederate Brigadier General Patrick Cleburne, one of the South's greatest military tacticians, left diaries showing he was striving to refine his methods to save lives while winning battles.

And then there is the Rhode Island Regiment's Major Sullivan Ballou who, in 1861 on the eve of the battle of Bull Run who wrote of courage and dedication to his cause.

Wiley Sword constructs a picture of the military mind that still resonates in today's wars.

WILEY SWORD is the author of several Civil War histories, including Mountains Touched with Fire and Southern Invincibility. He is a Fletcher Pratt Prize Award-winner and has been nominated numerous other prizes, including the Pulitzer. He lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Lines of Contention: Political Cartoons of the Civil War

by J. G. Lewin and P.J. Huff

From the publisher:
The political turmoil of the Civil War Era has been analyzed many times, but one area of this period's history is often overlooked: a large body of humorous, clever, and scathing editorial cartoons from publications such as Harper's Weekly, Vanity Fair, Punch, and Leslie's Illustrated.

In Lines of Contention, the best of these cartoons has finally been collected into one place to illuminate the social, political, and cultural climate of Civil War—Era America. The cartoons have been pulled from both sides of the fence and provide insight into the incidents and opinions surrounding the war as well as the mind-sets and actions of all the major figures. Lines of Contention presents a unique history of the Civil War and its participants.

Small Arms at Gettysburg: Infantry and Cavalry Weapons in America's Greatest Battle

by Joseph G. Bilby

From the publisher:
The three-day battle of Gettysburg has probably been the subject of more books and articles than any other comparable event. Surprisingly, until this work, no one has analyzed the firearms and other individual soldier's weapons used at Gettysburg in any great detail. The battle was a watershed, with military weapons technologies representing the past, present, and future--sabers, smoothbores, rifles, and breechloaders--in action alongside each other, providing a unique opportunity to compare performance and use, as well as determining how particular weapons and their deployment affected the outcome and course of the battle.

Small Arms at Gettysburg: Infantry and Cavalry Weapons in America's Greatest Battle covers all of the individual soldier's weapons--muskets, rifle-muskets, carbines, repeaters, sharpshooter arms, revolvers, and swords--providing a detailed examination of their history and development, technology, capabilities, and use on the field at Gettysburg. Here we learn that the smoothbore musket, although beloved by some who carried it, sang its swan song, the rifle-musket began to come into its own, and the repeating rifle, although tactically mishandled, gave a glimpse of future promise. This is the story of the weapons and men who carried them into battle during three days in July 1863.

Joseph G. Bilby served as a lieutenant in the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1966-1967. He is a columnist for Civil War News, assistant curator at the National Guard Militia Museum of New Jersey, and is author of A Revolution in Arms: A History of the First Repeating Rifles, also available from Westholme.

Shiloh and Corinth: Sentinels of Stone

by Timothy T. Isbell

From the publisher:
On April 6 and 7, 1862, at Shiloh a desperate battle between surprised Union forces and attacking Confederates ushered in the carnage that would mark the Civil War. At the Hornet's Nest, in the Peach Orchard, across Rea's Field and Hell's Hollow more than 20,000 men were killed, wounded, or reported missing in the fierce fighting. There were more casualties in two days at Shiloh than in all the previous American wars combined.

The Confederacy's defeat at Shiloh led to the Union occupation of Corinth, Mississippi, a crucial railhead for supplying campaigning armies. As part of the South's last great offensive in October 1862, Confederates tried but failed to retake this fortified town.

Shiloh and Corinth: Sentinels of Stone examines the brave deeds performed by soldiers of the North and South. Approximately 93 striking photographs and accompanying histories bring the battlefields to life, from Shiloh and Savannah, Tennessee, to Iuka and Corinth, Mississippi. The book chronicles the deaths of Albert Sidney Johnston and W. H. L. Wallace, the first victories of Ulysses S. Grant's military career, the failures of Earl Van Dorn, the torment of William Rosecrans, and the angst of Sterling Price. Shiloh and Corinth: Sentinels of Stone leads the reader to the present-day landscapes where America learned the Civil War would be long and bloody.

This combination of text with color photographs captures the landscapes and monuments of two Civil War battlefields:

-Offers the only photography/history book on the Shiloh campaign
-Details stories of towns, communities, and battlefields sometimes neglected by historians
-Includes over 90 full-color images by an award-winning photojournalist
-Complements the author's two previous books Gettysburg: Sentinels of Stone and Vicksburg: Sentinels of Stone

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this November title is unknown.

The Civil War Veterans of San Diego: Including Citations to Genealogical Research Sources in San Diego, California

by Barbara Palmer

From the publisher:
A study was conducted to indentify Civil War veterans who migrated to San Diego, California, after the war. Nearly 2,000 veterans were identified, mostly Union veterans from the Northern States. For example: 281 were born in New York, 251 in Ohio, 172 in Pennsylvania, and 112 in Indiana.

This book includes tombstone inscriptions and cemetery office records for the veterans and their wives, where available. Veteran intake records for the Heintzleman and Datus Coon G.A.R. posts give city or state of birth, Civil War unit and rank, length of service, where discharged, date of application to the San Diego G.A.R., age at time of application, occupation, death dates, and burial locations, where available. An all name index includes state of birth and state of the veteran's first enlistment (which often varied), allowing a determination of individual migration patterns over time. A guide to research in San Diego includes sources for military, church, census, vital, probate, cemetery, and other records. Cemetery histories and maps are also included.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this November title is unknown.

Rhett Butler's People

by Donald McCaig

From the publisher:
Fully authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate, Rhett Butler's People is the astonishing and long-awaited novel that parallels the Great American Novel, Gone with the Wind. Twelve years in the making, the publication of Rhett Butler's People marks a major and historic cultural event.

Through the storytelling mastery of award-winning writer Donald McCaig, the life and times of the dashing Rhett Butler unfold. Through Rhett's eyes we meet the people who shaped his larger than life personality as it sprang from Margaret Mitchell's unforgettable pages: Langston Butler, Rhett's unyielding father; Rosemary, his steadfast sister; Tunis Bonneau, Rhett's best friend and onetime slave; Belle Watling, the woman for whom Rhett cared for long before he met Scarlett O'Hara at Twelve Oaks Plantation, on the fateful eve of the Civil War.

Of course, there is Scarlett. Katie Scarlett O'Hara, the headstrong, passionate woman whose life is inextricably entwined with Rhett's: more like him than she cares to admit; more in love with him than she'll ever know…

Brought to vivid and authentic life by the hand of a master, Rhett Butler's People fulfills the dreams of those whose imaginations have been indelibly marked by Gone with the Wind.

Donald McCaig is the award-winning author of Jacob's Ladder, designated "the best civil war novel ever written" by The Virginia Quarterly. People magazine raved, "Think Gone with the Wind, think Cold Mountain." It won the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction and the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction.

"Rhett Butler's People covers the period from 1843 to 1874, nearly two decades more than are chronicled in Gone with the Wind. Readers will…get inside Rhett's head as he meets and courts Scarlett O'Hara in one of the most famous love affairs of all time." --The New York Times

"McCaig is a bred-in-the-bones storyteller." -Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Geraldine Brooks

Donald McCaig is the award-winning author of Jacob’s Ladder designated “the best civil war novel ever written” by The Virginia Quarterly. People magazine raved “Think Gone With the Wind, think Cold Mountain.” It won the Michael Sharra Award for Civil War Fiction and the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction.

Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction

by Mitchell Snay

From the publisher:
After the American Civil War, several movements for ethnic separatism and political self-determination significantly shaped the course of Reconstruction. The Union Leagues, which began during the war to support the northern effort, spread to the South after the war and mobilized African Americans to fight for their political rights and economic security. Opposing the Leagues was the Ku Klux Klan, which used intimidation and violence to maintain the political and economic hegemony of southern whites. Founded in 1858 as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, the Irish-American Fenians sought to liberate Ireland from English rule.

Mitchell Snay provides a compelling comparison of these seemingly disparate groups in Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, illuminating the contours of nationalism during Reconstruction. Despite their separate and often opposing goals, the Fenians, Union Leagues, and the Klan, Snay reveals, shared many characteristics.

To various extents, they were secret societies that sought to advance their mission through both political and extra-political means. Both the League and the Klan employed elaborate rites of initiation and secret passwords common to nineteenth-century fraternal organizations. They also shared a similar political culture of secrecy, conspiracy, and countersubversion. All three groups were quasi-military in structure and activities and shared a desire for the control of land.

Among the three organizations, Snay shows, the Fenians provide the clearest case of nationalist aspirations along the lines of ethnicity, though the rise of racial consciousness among both southern whites and blacks also might be seen as expressions of ethnic nationalism. According to Snay, the political culture of Reconstruction encouraged the nationalist ambitions of these groups, but channeled their separatist impulses along civil rather than ethnic lines by focusing on questions of freedom, citizenship, and suffrage. In addition, the Republican emphasis on color-blind equality limited overt expressions of national identities based solely on ethnicity or race.

Unlike southern whites and blacks, Irish Americans are seldom mentioned in Reconstruction histories. By joining the Fenians with freedpeople and southern whites, Snay seeks to assert their central relevance to the dynamics of nationalism during Reconstruction and offers a highly original analysis of Reconstruction as an Age of Capital and an Age of Emancipation where categories of race, class, and gender--as well as nationalism--were fluid and contested.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this November title is unknown.

Lee and Grant at Appomattox

by MacKinlay Kantor

From the publisher:
From a Pulitzer Prize winner comes the story of an unforgettable moment in American history: the historic meeting between General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant that ended the Civil War.

MacKinlay Kantor captures all the emotions and the details of those few days: the aristocratic Lee’s feeling of resignation; Grant’s crippling headaches; and Lee’s request—which Grant generously allowed—to permit his soldiers to keep their horses so they could plant crops for food.

The Civil War Paintings of Mort Kunstler, Vol. 3: The Gettysburg Campaign

by Mort Kunstler

From the publisher:
For nearly thirty years, Mort Kunstler has focused his considerable artistic talent on interpreting the Civil War. In crafting his work to reflect poignant moments or critical instances of the conflict, he has turned to leading historians and scholars -- such as Henry Steele Commager, James McPherson, William C. Davis, and James I. Robertson Jr. -- for informative details that he has then translated on canvas to create an indelible image of this defining ordeal in America's history. More than 160 of these images -- supplemented by preliminary sketches, early studies, and photographs of works in progress -- are the basis for the four volumes in this series.

Kunstler has also explored the human side of this national struggle. Thus he has produced thoughtful studies of leaders at decisive moments, instances of daily camp life for the soldiers, and those early romantic notions that it would be a bloodless war, predicated on the belief that a show of inner strength would prevail.

Historian James I. Robertson Jr. recently noted, "Among the handful who truly sense the human, indelible element of that war is Mort Kunstler. That alone goes far in explaining why he is the premier Civil War artist of our time, if not of all time....His subjects are always widely appealing to the eye and to the mind. [He] pursues accuracy to an extent that would make some historians blush."

In the past twenty years, Kunstler's portfolio has been published in twelve books, including companion pieces for the epic films Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. These paintings are reproduced here along with a lively history of the war.

Mort Kunstler is the reigning dean of American historical artists. No other artist has illustrated so many events in America with such authenticity and drama, from cave-dwelling Native Americans to the space program. He has had numerous one-man exhibitions at galleries such as the Hammer Galleries in New York City. He also was the subject of a one-hour special on A&E Network's Time Machine. His previous books include Images of the Civil War, Gettysburg, Jackson and Lee, and The Civil War Art of Mort Kunstler. He lives in Oyster Bay, New York.

Women in the American Civil War

by Lisa Tendrich Frank, Editor

From the publisher:
This fascinating work tells the untold story of the role of women in the Civil War, from battlefield to home front.

Soldiering for Glory: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Frank Schaller, Twenty-second Mississippi Infantry

Edited by Mary W. Schaller and Martin N. Schaller

From the publisher:
Confederate colonel Frank Schaller lived a life of grand ambition, driven to attain rank, fortune, a good marriage, and some measure of redemption in the eyes of his German family. Edited by Mary W. Schaller and Martin N. Schaller, his correspondence from the 1860s follows his battlefield experiences, his machinations for advancement, and his courtship of Sophie Sosnowski of Columbia, South Carolina.

Schaller emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1855 and began the career as a military science instructor that would lead him to North Carolina and the Hillsborough Military Academy in 1861. His training in Germany and his combat experience with the French army in the Crimean War made him a candidate for quick advancement once the Civil War began. From the time of North Carolina's secession in 1861 until his being wounded at Shiloh in April 1862, Schaller advanced rapidly from lieutenant to colonel. But after Shiloh his consistent—and somewhat conspicuous—medical complaints kept him from combat while he worked to maintain his rank as regimental commander of the Twenty-second Mississippi Infantry and pursue marriage into a prominent family.

Though largely a peripheral figure in the great conflict, Schaller reveals much in his correspondence about military actions and the inner workings of the Confederate officer corps. The critical views of this disciplined European military commander on the quality and training of his American volunteer soldiers is particularly telling. He recounts his firsthand perspectives on the Battle of Shiloh, the retreat from Nashville, the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the defeat at Gettysburg. His letters to Sophie Sosnowski also detail the nature of courtship practices in the war-torn South.

The story is completed in the editors' epilogue as they chronicle Schaller's marriage to Sosnowski, resignation from the Confederate ranks, and relocation to Athens, Georgia, where he taught briefly and then resumed his odyssey until his death in 1881. Schaller's letters portray life and culture in the Confederacy as witnessed by an immigrant eager to find personal success and glory in America.

Mary W. Schaller is the author or editor of fifteen previous books and plays, including Papa Was a Boy in Gray: Memories of Confederate Veterans Related by Their Living Daughters.

A descendant of Frank Schaller, Martin N. Schaller is a retired U.S. Navy officer and technology executive. The Schallers live in Burke, Virginia.

From CWBN:
This is a very well written (and edited) collection featuring the life struggles of a Jewish German Rebel officer whose early career embraced the CSA's Polish Brigade. Considering that one of the co-authors here is descended from Frank Schaller, the tone of this work is refreshingly critical. Schaller is rarely taken at his own self-worth and yet the reader develops a sympathy and curiosity that keeps the pages turning. Well worth a piece of your leisure-reading schedule.

Abraham Lincoln, The Illustrated Edition: The Prairie Years and The War Years

by Carl Sandburg, Edward C. Goodman (editor)

From the publisher:
Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg’s Pulitzer Prize winner Abraham Lincoln won praise as the most noteworthy historical biography of his generation. He later distilled his monumental creation into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction.

Magnificently produced, this special abridged and illustrated edition features foil stamping on the spine, an imitation cloth case, high quality paper, and collaged endpapers in four-color sepia. More than 250 engaging and often rare historical photos, along with descriptive captions, allow readers to visualize Lincoln’s journey from country lawyer to perhaps the most influential and beloved president of the United States. The fascinating pictures—many in color—provide a very intimate glimpse into Lincoln’s world. You’ll see his personal handwritten copy of the Gettysburg address, the gun that tragically ended his life, as well as a variety of rarely-viewed paraphernalia and personal effects. The images come from such notable artists as the esteemed Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, Joseph Boggs Beale, Currier and Ives, and Alexander Gardner.

Three Came Home

by Edward Aronoff

From the publisher:
On April first, just a few days before Lee surrenders at Appomattox, Colonel Raymond Rutherford is wounded at the battle of Five Forks. Although in great pain he soldiers on until he can no longer march and is hospitalized. He misses the surrender and seeing that all his brigade is gone starts out for his home in North Carolina. On his way home he has a violent encounter with a deserter. He is rescued by a young widow in an encounter that will change his life forever.

Edward Aronoff is the author of several Civil War books including the award-winning Betrayal at Gettysburg. He has also authored The Pagliacci Affair, Last Chance, The Hawaiian Affair, and Harold and Joe.

Lincoln's Christianity

by Michael Burkhimer

From the publisher:
After listening to Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, many in the audience were stunned. Instead of a positive message about the coming Union victory, the president implicated the entire country in the faults and responsibility for slavery. Using Old Testament references, Lincoln explained that God was punishing all Americans for their role in the calamity with a bloody civil war.

These were surprising words from a man who belonged to no church, did not regularly attend services, and was known to have publicly and privately questioned some of Christianity's core beliefs. But Lincoln's life was one with supreme sadness--the death of his first fiancee, the subsequent loss of two of his sons--and these events, along with the chance encounter with a book in Mary Todd's father's library, The Christian's Defense, are all part of the key to understanding Lincoln's Christianity. Biblical quotations soon entered his speeches--a point noted by Stephen Douglas in their debates--but it is unclear whether Lincoln's use of scripture was a signal that American politicians should openly embrace religion in their public lives, or a rhetorical tool to manipulate his audience, or a result of a personal religious transformation. After his death both secular and religious biographers claimed Lincoln as one of their own, touching off a controversy that remains today.

In Lincoln's Christianity, Michael Burkhimer examines the entire history of the president's interaction with religion--accounts from those who knew him, his own letters and writings, the books he read--to reveal a man who did not believe in orthodox Christian precepts (and might have had a hard time getting elected today) yet, by his example, was a person and president who most truly embodied Christian teachings.

"Abraham Lincoln's religious beliefs is a controversial subject and not without its pitfalls, but Mr. Burkhimer has succeeded eminently."-- Edward Steers, author of Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Major General Robert E. Rodes of the Army of Northern Virginia: A Biography

by Darrell L. Collins

From the publisher:
Jedediah Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson's renowned mapmaker, expressed the feelings of many contemporaries when he declared that Robert Rodes was the best division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia. This well-deserved accolade is all the more remarkable considering that Rodes, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and a prewar railroad engineer, was one of a very few officers in Lee's army to rise so high without the benefit of a West Point education.

Major General Robert E. Rodes of the Army of Northern Virginia: A Biography, is the first deeply researched scholarly biography on this remarkable Confederate officer.

From First Manassas in 1861 to Third Winchester in 1864, Rodes served in all the great battles and campaigns of the legendary Army of Northern Virginia. He quickly earned a reputation as a courageous and inspiring leader who delivered hard-hitting attacks and rock steady defensive efforts. His greatest moment came at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, when he spearheaded Stonewall Jackson's famous flank attack that crushed the left wing of General Hooker's Army of the Potomac.

Rodes began the conflict with a deep yearning for recognition and glory, coupled with an indifferent attitude toward religion and salvation. When he was killed at the height of his glorious career at Third Winchester on September 19, 1864, a trove of prayer books and testaments were found on his corpse.

Based upon exhaustive new research, Darrell Collins's new biography breathes life into a heretofore largely overlooked Southern soldier. Although Rodes' widow consigned his personal papers to the flames after the war, Collins has uncovered a substantial amount of firsthand information to complete this compelling portrait of one of Robert E. Lee's most dependable field generals.

Darrell L. Collins is the author of several books on the Civil War, including General William Averell's Salem Raid: Breaking the Knoxville Supply Line (1999) and Jackson's Valley Campaign: The Battles of Cross Keys and Port Republic (The Virginia Civil War Battles and Leaders Series, 1993). A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Darrell and his wife Judith recently relocated to Conifer, Colorado.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this November title is not known.

Civil War Sites, 2nd Edition: The Official Guide to the Civil War Discovery Trail

by Civil War Preservation Trust

From the publisher:
This easy-to-use guide, completely revised and updated in clear, concise prose, features more than hundreds of sites in 31 states--solemn battlefields, gracious mansions, state parks, cemeteries, memorials, museums, and more. Specific directions, hours, and contact information help to plan the trip; evocative description and detailed maps help orient you when you're there. Also, boxed sidebars highlight select people and events of the Civil War.

The Civil War Preservation Trust is a private, nonprofit organization with more than 36,000 members across the country.

Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates

by Glenn W. LaFantasie

From the publisher:
William C. Oates is best remembered as the Confederate officer defeated at Gettysburg's Little Round Top, losing a golden opportunity to turn the Union's flank and win the battle--and perhaps the war. Now, Glenn W. LaFantasie--bestselling author of Twilight at Little Round Top--has written a gripping biography of Oates.

Oates was no moonlight-and-magnolias Southerner, as LaFantasie shows. Raised in the hard-scrabble Wiregrass Country of Alabama, he ran away from home as a teenager, roamed through Louisiana and Texas--where he took up card sharking--and finally returned to Alabama, to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a respected attorney. During the war, he rose to the rank of colonel, served under Stonewall Jackson and Lee, was wounded six times and lost an arm. Returning home, he launched a successful political career, becoming a seven-term congressman and ultimately governor. LaFantasie shows how, for Oates, the war never really ended--he remained devoted to the Lost Cause, and spent the rest of his life waging the political battles of Reconstruction.

Here then is a richly evocative story of Southern life before, during, and after the Civil War, based on first-time and exclusive access of family papers and never-before-seen archives.

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and the Director of the Center for the Civil War in the West at Western Kentucky University. He is the bestselling author of Twilight at Little Round Top. He has also written for several magazines and newspapers, including American History, North & South, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, The New York Times Book Review, America's Civil War, Civil War Times Illustrated, and The Providence Journal.

From the critics:
"Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, this captivating biography is a signal contribution to Civil War historiography.... In LaFantasie's penetrating analysis, Oates becomes the avatar of everything both objectionable and laudable in the antebellum and postwar South as well as in the intervening Civil War." - Library Journal

LaFantasie's thorough scholarship and ability to marshal facts in readable prose means that the book will especially reward students of the Confederacy's "middle management"--the local entrepreneurs who became field-grade officers. A valuable addition to the Civil War shelves. - Booklist

Hated Ideas and the American Civil War Press

by Hazel Dicken-Garcia and Giovanna Dell'Orto

From CWBN:
One of the most cherished principles in American journalism is the notion that unpopular and even hated ideas deserve First Amendment protection and fair-handed treatment from journalists. But has this principle always existed, and how are hated ideas treated during times of crisis, such as war?

In this book, media historians Hazel Dicken-Garcia and Giovanna Dell’Orto search for some of the answers by analyzing newspaper coverage of hated ideas — such as abolitionism and slavery — during the American Civil War. They found that the Civil War strengthened the idea of journalism’s responsibility to the public; editors often had eloquent free speech discussions; and opposition presses were sometimes defended.

However, the data also showed that tolerance was the exception rather than the rule. "[E]ditors consistently supported the larger political system over any professional journalism ideology, the ‘common good’ over individual rights, and military ‘discretion’ over constitutional principles," the authors write.

The authors conclude that "although the editors’ intolerance makes their statements about the Constitution ... seem hollow, it must be remembered that they were in the midst of a highly abnormal national crisis. ... [T]he Civil War experience underscores the fact that marginalized ideas across history have persisted, often to become accepted as part of mainstream culture. Despite intolerance by journalists ... of certain ideas ... the First Amendment has continued to sustain civil liberties ... ."

Hazel Dicken-Garcia (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin) is a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, which received the Kappa Tau Alpha Best Book Award in 1990. She received the Sidney Kobre Award, given by the American Journalism Historians Association for contributions to journalism history in 2006.

Giovanna Dell'Orto (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is an Associated Press journalist. She has been studying 19th- century journalists' interpretation of free speech rights for more than 10 years. Her first book, Giving Meanings to the World, explored how the first U.S. newspaper foreign correspondents created images of the world for readers.

A Fierce, Wild Joy: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Edward J. Wood, 48th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment

by Stephen E. Towne

From the publisher:
The ninety letters in this collection document the Civil War career of Col. Edward Jesup Wood, an officer of the 48th Indiana. Evocative and rich in detail, A Fierce, Wild Joy offers a view of the war from an officer's perspective and provides important insights into the day-to-day administration of a Civil War regiment.

Wood was born in Florida to a Connecticut father and slave-owning mother, and orphaned in early youth. He was raised in New England to be an abolitionist, and at the age of fifteen he entered Dartmouth College. His military career began in 1861, and over the course of the war Wood's regiment participated in several key battles and campaigns, including Corinth, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and the March to the Sea.

Thoughtful, intelligent, and articulate, Wood was a keen observer of details during his time in the Western Theater. His letters vividly bring the war to life as he describes the events of some of its most important campaigns. His change in perspective over time is evident: readers will witness Wood's naïve optimism for a quick and sure victory transform to dawning realization about the long haul and horrors of war.

Readers will appreciate Wood's broad view of the military campaign, political exigencies surrounding the war, and the effects of war on both North and South. A stark reminder of the war's costs are emphasized by Wood's later tragic life. He returned home and committed suicide before his fortieth birthday. A Fierce, Wild Joy includes biographical essays that put Wood in context and aptly remind readers that many who served in the war did not go home to peace and happiness.

Stephen E. Towne is assistant university archivist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His articles have appeared in Indiana Magazine of History, Journalism History, and Civil War History.

Drummer Boy Willie Mcgee, Civil War Hero and Fraud

by Thomas Fox

From the publisher:
On December 7, 1864, just one week after the bloody battle of Franklin, Tennessee, William McGee, a drummer boy from Newark, New Jersey, was credited with leading a Federal force to a decisive victory over the Confederates in a clash just thirty miles from the carnage at Franklin. This 15-year-old Irish-American, on convalescent duty and acting as an orderly to General Lovell Rousseau, was recognized for the capture of two guns, several hundred prisoners, and the saving of Fortress Rosecrans in Murfreesboro from the famed Nathan Bedford Forrest.

For his actions, young McGee would soon be awarded a Medal of Honor, written up in newspapers and books as a glorious New Jersey legend, be commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army at age 18, and then, inexplicably at the height of his notoriety, virtually disappear from history for more than 100 years. This is the story of a lost war hero, a man-child with the world at his feet, whose fall from grace is accelerated by fame, lies, alcohol, bigamy, and murder.

Retired high school basketball coach Thomas Fox is a librarian at a private school in Sussex County, New Jersey.

Civil War Museum Treasures: Outstanding Artifacts and the Stories Behind Them

by Kenneth D. Alford

From the publisher:
A Bible, an officer’s mess kit, a cane arm chair and a blood-stained note... at first glance, these items might not seem to have much in common. But on closer examination they prove to be some of the most interesting artifacts from the Civil War. This volume searches out and details memorabilia in museums spread over 21 states and the District of Columbia.

Beginning with an overview of the Civil War, the book provides a state-by-state guide to various museums and historical societies with particular focus on matchless Civil War objects in their collections. Chapters provide the description of each museum and details on how each artifact came to be in that location. A chronological narrative centering on each rare item is then provided, placing the object within the timeline of the war and linking it to a specific event. An appendix contains a guide to battles which are known by various names.

Kenneth D. Alford has written on the treasures and spoils of World War II. He has served as a historical consultant fro television productions involving looted Nazi treasures and for cases involving reparations for World War II looting. Retired from a career in banking, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Lincoln's Own Stories

by Anthony Gross

From the publisher:
Lincoln's Own Stories (published in 1912) is a well-loved collection of tales told about and by Abraham Lincoln throughout his life, from childhood to presidency.

Contents:

Introduction
Earlier Years
The Lawyer
Local Politics and the Douglas Debates
At the White House
At the Front
The Commander-in-Chief

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder and the Making of a Great President

by Julie M. Fenster

From the critics:
By 1856, Abraham Lincoln was one of the most successful attorneys in Illinois. He had served a term in the U.S. Congress, but it appeared that he had abandoned a political career. However, as was observed, Lincoln's ambition was an engine that would not quit. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had intensified the national debate over slavery, and it drew Lincoln back into political activism. At the same time, Lincoln accepted the task of defending a young man accused of murdering the husband of his lover. Fenster's absorbing chronicle follows two tracks: Lincoln's reentry into the tumultuous political wars in Illinois, as Democrats, Know-Nothings, and the newly formed Republican Party vied for power; and how the death of a Springfield blacksmith evolved into a sensational murder trial. When the two tracks merge, Fenster illustrates Lincoln's emergence as a cagey politician and eloquent antislavery voice with an enhanced national reputation. This is a worthy addition to our ever-expanding knowledge concerning America's secular saint. - Booklist

"Fenster's rhythms have Twain-like timing. . . . Grandiloquent statements, dark adumbrations of the president-to-be or the tragedies with which his name is now inescapably entwined, are not necessary. Fenster knows that." - Library Journal

The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War

by Robert E. Bonner

From the publisher:
They are all infantrymen; none were commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is nineteen stunning watercolors that cover a year’s enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six are from slave states, one of whom was a Unionist. Drawing from the more than 60,000 documents housed in the privately held Gilder Lehrman Collection, Robert E. Bonner has movingly reconstructed the experiences of sixteen Civil War soldiers, using their own accounts to knit together a ground-level view of the entire conflict.

The immediacy of diaries and the intimacy of letters to loved ones accompany the humor of an anonymous cartoonist from Massachusetts, the vivid paintings of Private Henry Berckhoff.

All reproduced for the first time in The Soldier’s Pen, the documents and images that Bonner weaves together, providing context and explanation as required, powerfully re-create the day-to-day lives of the soldiers who fought and died for Union and Confederacy. Not since the 2000 publication of Robert Sneden’s paintings and papers in Eye of the Storm has a collection of original Civil War documents so evocatively captured the war.

Assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, Robert E. Bonner is the author of two previous books on the Civil War. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

"For anyone interested in viewing America's traumatic Civil War from the perspective of ordinary individuals who found themselves in the Union and Confederate armies, Robert E. Bonner’s The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War will be a very rewarding experience. This expertly edited collection of letters and drawings mailed to the families and friends of sixteen ‘typical’ but quite diverse citizen–soldiers conveys a deeply human dimension to America’s most dehumanizing war." —David Brion Davis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

"Walt Whitman once said of the Civil War that ‘The real war will never get in the books.’ But the real war does get into this book, in the form of letters and diaries written by sixteen enlisted men, Union and Confederate, who tell it like it was."
—James McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom

"Robert E. Bonner has not only found some of the most riveting, impassioned, humorous, and powerful Civil War letters and journals ever written, he has brilliantly woven them together so that the overall collection reads like a first-rate work of literature. The Soldier’s Pen is a masterpiece of scholarship and, without question, one of the most extraordinary anthologies of Civil War correspondence I have ever read." —Andrew Carroll, editor of The New York Times bestselling WAR LETTERS

Images of Civil War Medicine: A Photographic History

by Gordon E. Dammann and Alfred Jay Bollet

From the publisher:
Dr. Alfred Bollet’s Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs won wide acclaim as an expert study. Now, in collaboration with Dr. Gordon Dammann, Dr. Bollet has taken his expertise one step further and pictorially illuminated this fascinating chapter in medical history.

Featuring 250 rare archival photographs, Images of Civil War Medicine is a comprehensive visual encyclopedia of medical care during a seminal event in American history. The book showcases the uniforms, equipment, and members of a large group of individual Civil War doctors — “Cartes de Visites” — along with resonant images of existing pre-war structures used to heal the sick.

Also here are prominent medical educators, hospitals, stewards, and ambulances,as well as images of surgery, dentistry, nursing, and embalming. Ideal for Civil War buffs, historians, and medical history enthusiasts, Images of Civil War Medicine gives a complete overview of this era's medical realities.

Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War

by Margaret Humphreys

From the publisher:
Black soldiers in the American Civil War were far more likely to die of disease than were white soldiers. In Intensely Human, historian Margaret Humphreys explores why this uneven mortality occurred and how it was interpreted at the time. In doing so, she uncovers the perspectives of mid-nineteenth-century physicians and others who were eager to implicate the so-called innate inferiority of the black body.

In the archival collections of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Humphreys found evidence that the high death rate among black soldiers resulted from malnourishment, inadequate shelter and clothing, inferior medical attention, and assignments to hazardous environments.

While some observant physicians of the day attributed the black soldiers' high mortality rate to these circumstances, few medical professionals -- on either side of the conflict -- were prepared to challenge the "biological evidence" of white superiority. Humphreys shows how, despite sympathetic and responsible physicians' efforts to expose the truth, the stereotype of black biological inferiority prevailed during the war and after.

Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine, a professor of history, and an associate clinical professor of medicine at Duke University. She is the author of Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States, also published by Johns Hopkins.

The Confederate Experience Reader: Selected Documents and Essays

by John D. Fowler

The Confederate Experience Reader provides students and professors with the essential materials needed to understand and appreciate the major issues confronting the Southern Republic's brief existence during the American Civil War.

This anthology covers the full history of the Confederate experience including the origins of the antebellum South, the rise of southern nationalism, the 1860 election and the subsequent Secession Crisis, the military conflict, and Reconstruction.

Drawing from a full range of primary writings that describe the experience of living in the Southern Republic in vivid detail, as well as a careful selection of secondary works by prominent scholars in the field of confederate history, The Confederate Experience Reader will allow students to situate the Confederate experience within the larger context of Southern and American history.

Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order

by John F. Mars

From the publisher:
Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order is the premier biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War commander known for his “destructive war” policy against Confederates and as a consummate soldier. This updated edition of John F. Marszalek’s award-winning book presents the general as a complicated man who, fearing anarchy, searched for the order that he hoped would make his life a success.

Sherman was profoundly influenced by the death of his father and his subsequent relationship with the powerful Whig politician Thomas Ewing and his family.

Although the Ewings treated Sherman as one of their own, the young Sherman was determined to make it on his own. He graduated from West Point and moved on to service at military posts throughout the South. This volume traces Sherman’s involvement in the Mexican War in the late 1840s, his years battling prospectors and deserting soldiers in gold-rush California, and his 1850 marriage to his foster sister, Ellen. Later he moved to Louisiana, and, after the state seceded, Sherman returned to the North to fight for the Union.

Sherman covers the general’s early Civil War assignments in Kentucky and Missouri and his battles against former Southern friends there, the battle at Shiloh, and his rise to become second only to Grant among the Union leadership. Sherman’s famed use of destructive war, controversial then and now, is examined in detail. The destruction of property, he believed, would convince the Confederates that surrender was their best option, and Sherman’s successful strategy became the stuff of legend.

This definitive biography, which includesforty-six illustrations, effectively refutes misconceptions surrounding the controversial Union general and presents Sherman the man, not the myth.

John F. Marszalek is Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, Mississippi State University. His publications include several books on William T. Sherman, and biographies of Civil War general Henry W. Halleck, black West Point cadet Johnson C. Whittaker, black congressman George W. Murray, and the infamous Jacksonian, Peggy Eaton.

From CWBN:
Amazon shows an October 2 release date for this title; B&N shows a November release.

Well Satisfied with My Position: The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall

by Michael A Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens (editors)

From the publisher:
Well Satisfied with My Position offers a first-person account of army life during the Civil War’s Peninsula Campaign and Battle of Fredericksburg. Spencer Bonsall, who joined the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward, kept a journal from March 1862 until March 1863, when he abruptly ceased writing. Editors Michael A. Flannery and Katherine H. Oomens place his experiences in the context of the field of Civil War medicine and continue his story in an epilogue.

Trained as a druggist when he was in his early twenties, Bonsall traveled the world, spent eight years on a tea plantation in India, and settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in the city surveyor’s office. But in March 1862, when he was in his mid-forties, the lure of serving his country on the battlefield led Bonsall to join the 81st Pennsylvania Infantry as a hospital steward.

Bonsall enjoyed his life with the Union army at first, comparing bivouacking in the woods to merely picnicking on a grand scale. “We are about as jolly a set of old bachelors as can be found in Virginia,” Bonsall wrote. But his first taste of the aftermath of battle at Fair Oaks and the Seven Days’ Battles in Virginia changed his mind about the joys of soldiering—though he never lost his zeal for the Union cause.

Bonsall details the camp life of a soldier from firsthand experience, outlines the engagements of the 81st, and traces the Battle of Fredericksburg and the Peninsula Campaign. He records facts not available elsewhere about camp conditions, attitudes toward Union generals and Confederate soldiers, and troop movements.

From the end of June to late October 1862, Bonsall’s illness kept him from writing in his journal. He picked up the record again in December 1862, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in which the Union suffered a staggering 10,200 casualties and the 81st Pennsylvania lost more than half its men. He vividly describes the bloody aftermath. Bonsall’s horse was shot out from underneath him at the battle of Gettysburg, injuring him seriously and ending his military career. Although he was listed as “sick in hospital” on the regiment’s muster rolls, he was labeled a deserter in the U.S. Army records. Indeed, after recovery from his injuries, Bonsall walked away from the army to resume life in Philadelphia with his wife and child.

Published for the first time, Bonsall’s journal offers an unusually personal glimpse into the circumstances and motives of a man physically ruined by the war. Seventeen illustrations, including some drawn by Bonsall himself, help bring this narrative to life.

Michael A. Flannery, associate professor and associate director for historical collections at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the author of John Uri Lloyd: The Great American Eclectic (SIU Press, 1998) and Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy, and co-author of America’s Botanico-Medical Movements: Vox Populi and Pharmaceutical Education in the Queen City: 150 Years of Service.

Katherine H. Oomens, formerly a Library Associate for the Reynolds Historical Library at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a graduate of Cornell University and holds master's degrees in museum studies (George Washington University) and library science (University of Alabama). She currently lives in Charlottesville, VA, with her husband and son.

From CWBN:
A release date of October 2 for this work appears on Amazon; B&N shows it as a November release.

Civil War Museum Treasures: Outstanding Artifacts and the Stories Behind Them

by Kenneth D. Alford

From the publisher:
A Bible, an officer’s mess kit, a cane arm chair and a blood-stained note... at first glance, these items might not seem to have much in common. But on closer examination they prove to be some of the most interesting artifacts from the Civil War. This volume searches out and details memorabilia in museums spread over 21 states and the District of Columbia. Beginning with an overview of the Civil War, the book provides a state-by-state guide to various museums and historical societies with particular focus on matchless Civil War objects in their collections. Chapters provide the description of each museum and details on how each artifact came to be in that location. A chronological narrative centering on each rare item is then provided, placing the object within the timeline of the war and linking it to a specific event. An appendix contains a guide to battles which are known by various names.

Kenneth D. Alford has written on the treasures and spoils of World War II. He has served as a historical consultant fro television productions involving looted Nazi treasures and for cases involving reparations for World War II looting. Retired from a career in banking, he lives in Richmond, Virginia.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this October title is unknown.

The First Louisiana Special Battalion: Wheat's Tigers in the Civil War

by Gary Screckengost

From the publisher:
From the little-known Filibuster Wars to the Civil War battlefield of Gaines’ Mill, this volume details the fascinating story of one of the South’s most colorful military units, the 1st Louisiana Special Battalion, aka Wheat’s Tigers.

Beginning with a brief look at the Filibuster Wars (a set of military attempts to annex Latin American countries into the United States as slave states), the work takes a close look at the men who comprised Wheat’s Tigers: Irish immigrant ship hands, New Orleans dock workers and Filibuster veterans.

Commanded by one of the greatest antebellum filibusterers, Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, the Tigers quickly distinguished themselves in battle through their almost reckless bravery, proving instrumental in Southern victories at the battles of Front Royal, Winchester and Port Republic. An in-depth look at Battle of Gaines’ Mill, in which Wheat’s Tigers suffered heavy casualties, including their commander, completes the story.

Appendices provide a compiled roster of the Wheat’s Tigers, a look at the 1st Louisiana’s uniforms and a copy of Wheat’s report about the Battle of Manassas. Never-before-published photographs are also included.

Author and historian Gary Schreckengost lives in Elm, Pennsylvania. An infantry officer in the Army Reserves, his work has been published in American Civil War Magazine, World War II Magazine, Field Artillery Journal and Armor Magazine.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this October title is unknown.

Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

by Earnest Obadele-starks

From the publisher:
Why slave smuggling and trafficking persisted after the Abolition Act ...

In 1891 a young W. E. B. DuBois addressed the annual American Historical Association on the enforcement of slave trade laws: "Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a combination calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine." One law in particular he was referring to was the Abolition Act of 1808. It was specifically passed to end the foreign slave trade. However, as Ernest Obadele-Starks shows, thanks to profiteering smugglers like the Lafitte brothers and the Bowie brothers, the slave trade persisted throughout the south for a number of years after the law was passed.

Freebooters and Smugglers examines the tactics and strategies that the adherents of the foreign slave trade used to challenge the law. It reassesses the role that Americans played in the continuation of foreign slave transshipments into the country right up to the Civil War, shedding light on an important topic that has been largely overlooked in the historiography of the slave trade.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this October title is unknown.

The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir's Civil War

by William L. Barney

From the publisher:
Despite the advances of the civil rights movement, many white southerners cling to the faded glory of a romanticized Confederate past. In The Making of a Confederate, William L. Barney focuses on the life of one man, Walter Lenoir of North Carolina, to examine the origins of southern white identity alongside its myriad ambiguities and complexities.

Born into a wealthy slaveholding family, Lenoir abhorred the institution, opposed secession, and planned to leave his family to move to Minnesota, in the free North. But when the war erupted in 1860, Lenoir found another escape route--he joined the Confederate army, an experience that would radically transform his ideals. After the war, Lenoir, like many others, embraced the cult of the Lost Cause, refashioning his memory and beliefs in an attempt to make sense of the war, its causes, and its consequences.

While some Southerners sank into depression, aligned with the victors, or fiercely opposed the new order, Lenoir withdrew to his acreage in the North Carolina mountains. There, he pursued his own vision of the South's future, one that called for greater self-sufficiency and a more efficient use of the land. For Lenoir and many fellow Confederates, the war never really ended. As he tells this compelling story, Barney offers new insights into the ways that (selective) memory informs history; through Lenoir's life, readers learn how individual choices can transform abstract historical processes into concrete actions.

"In this fascinating and beautifully written portrait . . . William L. Barney breathes life into many key aspects of the Civil War era as it was experienced in the Upper South. A major achievement."--Bruce Levine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War

"An enormously intelligent, sensitive, interesting, [and] significant biography of a minor character that takes us inside one white Southerner's life, family, and mind."--Mina Carson, Oregon State University

What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory and the American South

by Bruce E. Baker

From the publisher:
A great deal has been written about southern memory centering on the Civil War, particularly the view of the war as a valiant lost cause. In this challenging new book Bruce Baker looks at a related, and equally important, aspect of southern memory that has been treated by historians only in passing: Reconstruction. What Reconstruction Meant examines what both white and black South Carolinians thought about the history of Reconstruction and how it shaped the way they lived their lives in the first half of the twentieth century.

Baker addresses the dominant white construct of "the dark days of Reconstruction," which was instrumental both in ending Reconstruction and in justifying Jim Crow and the disfranchisement of African Americans in the South, setting the tone for early historians' accounts of Reconstruction. Looking back on the same era, African Americans and their supporters recalled a time of potential and of rights to be regained, inspiring their continuing struggles to change the South.

Baker draws on a tremendous range of newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and published materials, to show the intricate process by which the white-supremacist memory of Reconstruction became important in the 1890s, as segregation and disenfranchisement took hold in the South, and how it began to crumble as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Examining the southern memory of Reconstruction, in all its forms, is an essential element in understanding the society and politics of the twentieth-century South.

Bruce E. Baker is Lecturer in U.S. History at the University of London. His essays have appeared in numerous publications, including most recently The South Carolina Encyclopedia and Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this October title is unknown.

Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front

by James C. Marten

From the publisher:
The author of an acclaimed account of the lives of children in the Civil War, Marten here provides a more comprehensive introduction to the civilian history of the Civil War. Concise, vividly written chapters describe the home front through the lives of individuals and the histories of events and institutions in the North and South. The stories are organized around five broad themes: the northern home front, the southern home front, children, African Americans, and the war's aftermath.

The case studies feature voices of the famous, like Edmund Riffin and Booker T. Washington, but more often they offer the testimony of ordinary men, women, and children.The civilian history of the Civil War is one of changes large and small: the destruction of old racial relationships, the challenge to southern whites' assumptions and complacency, the expansion of government power and responsibility. In more personal terms, the changes include shifting notions of personal worth, and the centrality of war-time experiences to individual lives. Marten extends the story beyond the close of the fighting, to the legacies that shaped American culture for generations after the guns fell silent: veterans to care for, memories to file, nightmares to overcome, and lessons to process.

A superb blend of traditional narrative, case studies, and individual stories, Civil War America is a valuable resource for students and their teachers at all seeking to understand the many ways in which the Civil War was truly a people's war.

From CWBN:
This title is a reissue.

Camp Chase and the Evolution of Union Prison Policy

by Roger Pickenpaugh

From the publisher:
Camp Chase was a major Union POW camp and also served at various times as a Union military training facility and as quarters for Union soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Confederacy and released on parole or exchanged. As such, a careful, thorough, and objective examination of the history and administration of the camp will be of true significance in the literature on the Civil War.

Roger Pickenpaugh has been a history teacher for 27 years. He is the author of forthcoming book Captives in Gray: The Civil War Prisons of the Union.

Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee

by Robert Edward Lee

From the publisher:
This remarkable portrait of the idol of the Confederacy features personal reminiscences by his son as well as the general's letters to his family.

Dating from the Mexican-American War in the 1840s to Lee's death in 1870, they provide intimate glimpses of a well-known but enigmatic man.

Length: 480 pages.

Brady's Civil War Journal: Day-by-Day Events 1861-65

by Michael J. McAfee

From the publisher:
Mathew Brady and his team of ground-breaking assistants risked life and liberty to capture up-close images of the Civil War; Brady actually got so close to the action during the First Battle of Bull Run that he only narrowly avoided capture. His evocative sepia-toned photographs of generals, soldiers, freed slaves, and battlefields have lived on, giving new generations a close-up view of the war that ended slavery and created modern America. Here, Michael J. McAfee, Curator of History at the West Point Museum, adds his own extensive knowledge of the Civil War to Brady’s photographs, creating an account of the war as it unfolded. This fascinating view of a conflict that continues to haunt the hearts and minds of Americans is visually stunning, an excellent reference, and great reading.

From CWBN:
The exact day of release for this October title is unknown.