Guardian of Savannah: Fort Mcallister, Georgia, in the Civil War and Beyond

by Roger S. Durham

From the publisher:
Built out of sand and mud and designed to serve as the southern anchor in the coastal defenses of Savannah, Georgia, Fort McAllister was constructed in June 1861 on the Great Ogeechee River, twelve miles south of the Savannah River. Roger S. Durham offers a comprehensive history of the fort's construction, strategic importance during the Civil War, and postwar restoration in this vivid account of how an earthen defense withstood not only devastating naval assaults but also the effects of time. Durham intertwines historical facts with human fates through frequent use of primary sources, letting the fort's defenders and attackers speak for themselves and bringing readers into the fiery heat of battle.

Two innovations in warfare wrought by the Civil War were the rifled cannon--which proved detrimental to the masonry construction of Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River--and the ironclad warship, but neither could compromise the earthen parapets of Fort McAllister. Over the course of the war, McAllister's original four-battery design was augmented to include twenty-two guns, making the fort a much more difficult challenge to Union assaults. The monitor USS Montauk was twice summoned to take Fort McAllister and twice failed. In a third Union attempt, three ironclads and a supporting fleet of wooden gunboats bombarded the fort for seven hours, though the defenders suffered no casualties and the fort withstood the blasts. In all, seven unsuccessful naval attacks were made against the fort. McAllister's final threat did not come from the water but from the western reaches of the state. In December 1864 General William T. Sherman's famed March to the Sea negated the viability of coastal defenses, and Fort McAllister, like Savannah itself, fell at last.

Fort McAllister's story did not end with the war. In the 1930s the site was owned by the industrialist Henry Ford, who was instrumental in the initial preservation efforts to restore the fort as a historical monument. Ownership later passed to the International Paper Company, which in turn deeded the land to the State of Georgia. The historical site was opened to the public in 1963, on the centennial of the bombardments by the Union ironclads.

Durham's harrowing account of life and combat at Fort McAllister, and of the subsequent restoration, is augmented by twelve maps and sixty photographs--including rare images of Sherman's troops at the end of the March to the Sea and of early preservation initiatives.

Roger S. Durham is the director of the U.S. Army Heritage Museum in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Durham is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Georgia Southern University. His other books include High Seas and Yankee Gunboats: A Blockade-Running Adventure from the Diary of James Dickson and Fort McAllister.

From CWBN:
This well-written and interesting volume is one we can recommend to readers with interests in fortifications, seacoast defense, and naval artillery.

A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac

by Francis M. Wafer, Cheryl A. Wells editor

A fascinating glimpse into the world of Civil War America through the experience of a young Canadian surgeon.

Lured across the border by promises of opportunity and adventure, Francis M. Wafer - a young student from Queen's Medical College in Kingston - joined the Union's army of the Potomac as an assistant surgeon. From the battle of the Wilderness to the closing campaigns, Wafer was both participant and chronicler of the American Civil War.

Cheryl Wells provides an edited and fully annotated collection of Wafer's diary entries during the war, his letters home, and the memoirs he wrote after returning to Canada. Wafer's writings are a fascinating and deeply personal account of the actions, duties, feelings, and perceptions of a noncombatant who experienced the thick of battle and its grave consequences.

The only substantial account by a Canadian Civil War soldier who returned to Canada, A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac fills a critical gap in American Civil War historiography and will have broad appeal among scholars and enthusiasts.

"The detail provided by Wafer in his travels and work is absolutely fascinating ... the flavour of melancholy, fear, and "gallows humour" among the troops in the camp, the sounds and spectacle of retreat, the terror of battle ..." Greg Marquis, University of New Brunswick, Saint John

Cheryl A. Wells is associate professor, history, University of Wyoming, and the author of Civil War Time: Identity and Experience in America, 1861-1865.

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

Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations

by Phillip E. Myers

From the publisher:
“Phillip E. Myers’s Caution and Cooperation places Anglo-American relations during the Civil War within the broader context of the whole nineteenth century, arguing convincingly for the lack of any real chance of British intervention on the side of the Confederacy and dating the end-of-the-century Anglo-American rapprochement back about three decades. Based on extensive research in the United States and Great Britain, this major reinterpretation of the transatlantic special relationship is ‘international history’ in its truest sense.” —Mary Ann Heiss, Editor, New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations Series

It has long been a mainstay in historical literature that the Civil War had a deleterious effect on Anglo-American relations and that Britain came close to intervention in the conflict. Historians assert that it was only a combination of desperate diplomacy, the Confederacy’s military losses, and Lincoln’s timely issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation that kept the British on the sidelines. Phillip E. Myers seeks to revise this prevailing view by arguing instead that wartime relations between Britain and the United States were marked by caution rather than conflict.

Using a wide array of primary materials from both sides of the Atlantic, Myers traces the sources of potential Anglo-American wartime turmoil as well as the various reasons both sides had for avoiding war. And while he does note the disagreement between Washington and London, he convincingly demonstrates that transatlantic discord was ultimately minor and neither side seriously considered war against the other.

Myers further extends his study into the postwar period to see how that bond strengthened and grew, culminating with the Treaty of Washington in 1871. The Civil War was not, as many have believed for so long, an unpleasant interruption in British-American affairs; instead, it was an event that helped bring the two countries closer together to seal the friendship.

Soundly researched and cogently argued, Caution and Cooperation will surely prompt discussion among Civil War historians, foreign relations scholars, and readers of history.

Phillip E. Myers earned his B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in modern history from the University of Iowa. He is the director of administration of the Western Kentucky University Research Foundation, which he helped found nearly a decade ago.

From CWBN:
This title was released in March; we missed listing it.

Dispatches from Bermuda: The Civil War Letters of Charles Maxwell Allen, U.S. Consul at Bermuda, 1861-1888

Edited by Glen N. Wiche

From the publisher:
In the summer of 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Charles Maxwell Allen U.S. consul to Bermuda. During the Civil War, Allen’s post became one of vital importance to the United States as this British colony became a center for Confederate blockade-running activities. As the sole representative of Union interests in pro-Confederate Bermuda, Allen found himself involved in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering as he attempted to thwart these blockade-runners.

Allen’s dispatches shed new light on two important and often overlooked aspects of the war: the Union blockade of southern seaports and the effort to bring vital war supplies through the blockade to the Confederate states.

Author Glen N. Wiche has compiled all of Allen’s Civil War dispatches to the U.S. State Department and provides well-documented commentary to place Allen’s activities in the wider context of the “Atlantic campaign” of the Civil War. Dispatches from Bermuda paints a detailed picture of these activities and offers a rare account of this blockade-running traffic from a northern perspective.

Glen N. Wiche is a veteran antiquarian bookseller and historical consultant in Chicago. He is a freelance writer who lectures widely on historical and literary subjects.

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

Shades of Gray: A Novel of the Civil War in Virginia

by Jessica James

From the publisher:
Discover the fine line between friends and enemies in this epic love story that captures the emotions and fears of the country as war sweeps the land. This debut novel by Jessica James has received critical acclaim from Civil War authors and historians, as well as lovers of romance and historical fiction. Called “a sympathetic, loving portrait,” by the Historical Novel Society and “well written and expertly executed” by the Book Review Journal, Shades of Gray takes readers across the rolling hills of northern Virginia in a page-turning tale of courage as a Confederate cavalry commander and a Union spy defend their beliefs, their country and their honor.

“… Exciting, intense, romantic, and thrilling from start to finish. The most balanced book on the War Between the States I have ever read.” – Bob O’Connor, Author of The Virginian Who Might Have Saved Lincoln

“I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in years! Shades of Gray is an incredible achievement and a treasure.” – Virginia Morton, Historian/ Author of “Marching Through Culpeper”
–
“[James] has drawn a picture filled with conflict and love, loyalty and betrayal, history and romance, and a passion of lives lived in the moment.” – Jim Miller, Civil War Notebook

“…The Southern Confederacy exhibited extraordinary valor and devotion and high honor. This should never be forgotten by Americans. As long as there are writers like Jessica James, there is no danger of such forgetting.” - Clyde N. Wilson, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, University of South Carolina

“Well written and expertly executed… You cannot leave this book unchanged in your understanding of the souls of the Civil War.” – Heather Froeschl, Book Review Journal

“Re-enactors, historians, & followers of The War for Southern Independence will love this novel! It’s fast moving and holds the reader’s interest from cover to cover.” – David Wright, Past Commander Dearing-Beauregard Camp 1813, SCV

[James’] work stands out among the best of the historical novelists, and is a worthy addition to the Civil War fiction line-up. Huzzah! – Scott Mingus, Civil War Blogger

Jessica James is a former journalist and newspaper editor who resides in Gettysburg, Pa.

From CWBN:
We missed the release of this book when it originally appeared on January 19.

Camp William Penn

by Donald Scott Sr.

From the publisher:
Camp William Penn, established in 1863, was the largest federal facility to train black Northern-based soldiers during the Civil War and is steeped in Civil War history. Almost 11,000 troops and officers trained at the sprawling facility outside of Philadelphia and a special officers’ training school in the city.

The camp, backed by the Union League of Philadelphia, was located near the home of antislavery abolitionist Lucretia Mott. The area, today known as Cheltenham Township’s LaMott, was also instrumental in the Underground Railroad, with such great abolitionists as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass addressing the troops. The soldiers were a part of Abraham Lincoln’s Bureau of United States Colored Troops, and several earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroics during battle. The vintage photographs in Camp William Penn were obtained from government agencies, universities, historical organizations, and the personal collections of soldiers’ descendants.

Donald Scott Sr. is an assistant professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia and history columnist for the Journal Register Company. He has written about Camp William Penn as a contributor to America’s Civil War magazine and other publications.

Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship

by John Baldwin

From the publisher:
As the Confederacy felt itself slipping beneath the Union juggernaut in late 1864, the South launched a desperate counteroffensive to shatter the U.S. economy and force a standoff. Its secret weapon? A state-of-the-art raiding ship whose mission was to prowl the world’s oceans and sink the U.S. merchant fleet. The raider’s name was Shenandoah, and her executive officer was Conway Whittle, a twenty-four-year-old warrior who might have stepped from the pages of Arthurian legend. Whittle would share command with a dark and brooding veteran of the seas, Capt. James Waddell, and together with a crew of strays, misfits, and strangers, they would spend nearly a year sailing two-thirds of the way around the globe, destroying dozens of Union ships and taking more than a thousand prisoners, all while continually dodging the enemy.

Then, in August of 1865, a British ship revealed the shocking truth to the men of Shenandoah: The war had been over for months, and they were now being hunted as pirates.

What ensued was an incredible 15,000-mile journey to the one place the crew hoped to find sanctuary, only to discover that their fate would depend on how they answered a single question. Wondrously evocative and filled with drama and poignancy, Last Flag Down is a riveting story of courage, nobility, and rare comradeship forged in the quest to achieve the impossible.

From CWBN:
This is the first softcover edition of a previously released hardback.

Crisis Of Command In The Army Of The Potomac: Sheridan's Search for an Effective General

by Jay W. Simson

From the publisher:
With the ascendancy of Ulysses S. Grant in late 1863, the command tone of the United States Army underwent a dramatic change. While Grant's predecessor George McClellan had been overly cautious and reluctant to commit his full range of troops and resources to fight the South, Grant was committed to the philosophy that a war fought for total ends required total means.

Phillip Sheridan set about reorganizing the command to reflect Grant's new style. During the last six months of the war, he relieved three generals of their commands due to their inability to follow his orders precisely. William Averell, Alfred Torbert and Gouverneur Warren found themselves and their careers casualties of Sheridan's intense determination to bring an end to hostilities.

This work shows that only Ranald S. Mackenzie managed to survive Sheridan's search, proving himself the ideal subordinate in Sheridan's estimation.

Journalist Jay W. Simson is a member of the Western Ohio Civil War Roundtable, and has previously written on naval strategies of the Civil War. He lives in Van Wert, Ohio.

Gale Library Of Daily Life: American Civil War

by Steven E. Woodworth

From the publisher:
History is best absorbed through the words of those who experienced it. This 2-volume set illuminates daily life in both the North and the South during the American Civil War.

Approximately 220 articles, organized thematically for easy browsability, provide a wealth of reference and historical information on the battlefield and homefront experience and the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the North and South during the War.

Primary source documents in the form of first-person accounts, letters, diaries, journals, newspapers, and literature bring to life the experiences of the Union and Confederate participants and the people they left behind. Photographs, drawings, political cartoons, and maps augment the text, while sidebars further explore people, primary sources, and specific topics. Additional features include a chronology, annotated bibliography, and index.

Insiders' Guide to Civil War Sites in the Eastern Theater (Third Edition)

by Rebecca Pawlowski and Eric Ethier

From the publisher:
The Civil War enthusiast will find much of interest in this guide to more than 20 tours to Civil War sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia. Suggestions for accommodations and restaurants are included, as well as history, trivia, and lore about the sites and personalities of the War between the States.

For more than twenty years, the Insiders’ Guide series has remained the essential source for in-depth travel information. Each guide is written by locals and true insiders and offers a personal, practical perspective that readers everywhere have come to know and love.

Enter the vast expanse of The Eastern Theater––the land east of the Appalachian Mountains from near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Coast, and south to the Virginia-North Carolina border––and discover a world of Civil War history. Let this book be your guide as you set out to explore the region’s top Civil War attractions including the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park at the tri-state crossroads of West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland.

Inside you'll find:

• Excerpts from the diaries, letters, and memoirs of the men who fought in the
Civil War
• A glossary of Civil War terminology
• Special features on military and civic leaders
• Helpful listings of restaurants, accommodations, and special events in each area

The Quotable American Civil War

by Iain C. Martin

From the publisher:
The American Civil War was the most devastating event in our history—a country divided against itself, brother fighting brother in bloody conflict. From this torment emerged some of the greatest American leaders ever: Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Robert E. Lee. J.E.B Stuart. They and others emerge in this powerful and emotional collection that brings the Civil War to life.

Iain C. Martin is a freelance writer and historian, with an MA in history from Southern Connecticut State University. He lives with his family in Connecticut.

Brady's Civil War: A Collection of Memorable Civil War Images Photographed by Matthew Brady and His Assistants

by Webb Garrison

From the publisher:
This is one book that no Civil War buff should be without. It has 270 historical and fascinating photographs.

In the Civil War era, Matthew Brady and his staff became the country's foremost photographers of battle scenes and military life, traveling widely throughout the warring states with their cameras. Brady, who learned the rudiments of photography from Samuel Morse (the inventor of Morse code), had established his own daguerreotype studio in New York in 1844.

By the time of the war, however, Brady was suffering from extremely poor eyesight, so many of the photographs credited to him from this time were in fact taken by his staff. Nonetheless, he amassed a priceless archive of images of the war--some 6,000 of them--with subjects as diverse as politicians, military leaders, and soldiers in the field, as well as devastating scenes of carnage and destruction taken shortly after the battles, and portraits of home life during the war.

Brady's Civil War is, in many ways, the complete realization of Brady's dream of bringing his photographs to the world at large, as it not only offers 270 stunning Civil War photographs but also sets the record straight as to the authorship of the photographs, finally dispelling the questions and myths that have shrouded his legacy for more than a century.

The Civil War (The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series)

by Paul A. Cimbala

From the publisher:
From the initial enlistment and recruitment of men for the opposing armies, through their demobilization during the spring, summer, and fall of 1865, Paul A. Cimbala always places the soldier at the center of the story. This book shows how the men who signed up with the Union and the Confederacy fought their way through the bloody U.S. fields, how they adjusted to peace (often badly wounded and scarred), and how they remembered their experiences.

How did they cope with wounds and disease in the 1860s? What was the role of black soldiers on both the Union and Confederate sides? In wartime politics, why and how did soldiers continue to participate in the electoral process and what did they think about their politicians? Relying on his primary research on such topics as invalid soldiers and postwar experiences, Cimbala presents a vivid picture of the Civil War soldier's life. Highlights include: Motivations for men to enlist, and why blacks and other ethnic groups joined up.
- The mental and physical consequences to soldier survivors
- Drug and alcohol addiction in the Civil War
- Women's contributions on both sides of the war
- Daily life in the camp: letter writing; crazes to newspapers, camp followers and sex
- Prisoners' and guards' lives
- The Freedmen's Bureau
- Veterans, including black veterans, and organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan

The book also includes a timeline to put dates and events in better perspective; a comprehensive, topically arranged bibliography of primary and secondary sources; and a comprehensive index.

PAUL A. CIMBALA is Professor of History, Fordham University, and author of a number of books, including Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870; An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front (with Randall M. Miller); and Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History (with Robert F. Himmelberg).

March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

From the publisher:
A unique perspective on the Civil War as only Joseph Bruchac could tell it.

Louis Nolette is a fifteen-year-old Abenaki Indian from Canada who is recruited to fight in the northern Irish Brigade in the war between the states. Even though he is too young, and not American or Irish, he finds the promise of good wages and the Union’s fight to end slavery persuasive reasons to join up. But war is never what you expect, and as Louis fights his way through battle after battle, he encounters prejudice and acceptance, courage and cowardice, and strong and weak leadership in the most unexpected places.

Master storyteller and acclaimed author Joseph Bruchac tells a Civil War story based on the experiences of his own great grandfather. Chock-full of historical facts and details, this carefully researched book will give readers new insight into some of the untold stories and unsung heroes of the American Civil War.

Reading the Old Man: John Brown in American Culture

by Bruce Ronda

From the publisher:
Liberator? Madman? Genius? Martyr? John Brown achieved immediate and lasting notoriety through his attempt to foment an armed insurrection among black slaves in 1859, an event that many believed hastened the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. From the moment of his capture at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, there have been widely varying interpretations of the man and his motivations. Sometimes depicted as the grim conscience of a nation whose founding proclaimed the equality of all people, sometimes portrayed as a terrorist more devoted to his own martyrdom than to his cause, Brown has been a source of inspiration, fascination, and frustration for some of the country's greatest writers and artists.

In this absorbing book, Bruce Ronda examines the representations of Brown chronologically, ranging from Thoreau's “Plea for Captain John Brown”-with its ardent defense of Brown as a patriot, Transcendentalist, and true New Englander-through treatments by anonymous southern writers and well-known authors such as John Greenleaf Whittier, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Frederick Douglass, William Dean Howells, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Ronda then considers the major treatments of Brown in the early to mid-twentieth century by W. E. B. DuBois, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert Penn Warren. Of particular interest are discussions of a 1930s poem by Muriel Rukeyser, Truman Nelson's 1960 novel The Surveyor, and artwork by Jacob Lawrence. He concludes with studies of novels by three contemporary authors: Russell Banks, Michelle Cliff, and Bruce Olds.

Reading the Old Man challenges the assumption that literature about Brown falls predictably into two camps-celebration or outrage-either defending Brown as liberator and martyr or vilifying him as a traitor, incendiary, and madman. Instead, Ronda discovers a variety of approaches and reveals subtler, more complex portraits, even comparing Brown's fervor to that of today's religious terrorists.

Bruce Ronda is professor and chair of the Department of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of Intellect and Spirit: The Life and Works of Robert Coles and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms. He is the editor of The Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance Woman.

Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico

by Flint Whitlock

From the publisher:
Although most accounts of the Civil War’s New Mexico campaign have focused on the Confederate effort, Distant Bugles, Distant Drums brings to life the epic march of 1,000 men recruited from Colorado’s towns, farms, and mining camps to fight 3,000 Confederate soldiers in New Mexico.

Drawing on previously overlooked diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper accounts, military historian Flint Whitlock brings the Civil War in the West to life. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums details the battles of Coloradans against Confederate soldiers in New Mexico and offers vivid portraits of the leaders and soldiers involved —men whose strengths and flaws would shape the fate of the nation.

On their way to Colorado in search of gold and silver for the Confederacy’s dwindling coffers, Texan Confederates won a series of engagements along the Rio Grande. Hastily assembled troops that had marched to meet them from Colorado finally turned them back in an epic conflict at Gloriéta Pass.

Miners, farmers, and peacetime officers turned themselves overnight into soldiers to keep the Confederacy from capturing the West’s mines, shaping the outcome of the Civil War. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums tells their story.

Flint Whitlock is the author of The Fighting First, Given up for Dead, The Rock of Anzio, and Soldiers on Skis.

From the critics:
“[Whitlock] is an exceptionally good writer and anyone interested in the Civil War will enjoy what he has to say.” —Western Historical Quarterly

“Worthwhile reading just for its cast of characters, many of whom merge the spirit of the Civil War with the Wild West. . . . An equally wild and woolly read for Civil War or Western buff alike.” —Civil War Times

“By focusing explicitly on the North’s reaction to Confederate dreams of empire in the West, Flint Whitlock adds several new insights to historical knowledge of this increasingly well-publicized theater of the Civil War.” —Journal of Southern History

"An important new book by Denver military historian Flint Whitlock . . . this well-written, solidly researched history of Colorado’s Union troops is eye-opening." —Rocky Mountain News

"Military historian Flint Whitlock’s well-researched, well-written book provides fresh perspectives on the Civil War’s New Mexico battles." —Dallas Morning News

"Whitlock vividly traces the Confederate victories in New Mexico at Valverde, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe and the dubious triumph at Glorieta Mesa in March, 1862. . . . Anyone interested in the Civil War in the Southwest will enjoy this well-written account of the New Mexico campaign with its numerous photographs and outstanding maps clearly showing the paths of the armies." —Las Cruces Sun News

"Whitlock’s Distant Bugles, Distant Drums will strongly interest many readers, whther or not those interests leaned toward military history previously." —Alamosa Valley Courier

Lincoln's Censor

by David W. Bulla

From the publisher:
Lincoln's Censor examines the effect of government suppression on the Democratic press in Indiana during the spring of 1863.

Indiana's Democratic newspaper editors were subject to Milo S. Hascalls General Order No. 9, which proclaimed that all newspaper editors and public speakers that encouraged resistance to the draft or any other war measure would be treated as traitors.

Brigadier General Hascall, commander of the District of Indiana, was amplifying General Order No. 38 of Major General Ambrose Everts Burnside, the commander of the Department of the Ohio. Burnside's order declared that criticism of the president and the war effort was tantamount to declaring sympathies with the enemy. Throughout the war in Indiana, Union soldiers and/or Republican activists intimidated other Democratic editors, ransacking their offices and sometimes running them out of business. President Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the writ of habeas corpus in 1862, claiming presidential prerogatives given by the Constitution at times of invasion or rebellion, had some political misgivings about the intimidation of Democratic newspapers, but let the practice continue in Indiana from April through June of 1863. Finally, at the request of Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton, Lincoln's War Department ordered Burnside to relieve Hascall of his command. Bulla's observation about the sustainability of the free press in times of war have implications in todays world.

Alexandria: 1861-1865

by Charles and Andrew Mills

From the publisher:
Alexandria and Northern Virginia were the first areas to feel the fury of the Civil War. The New York Herald war correspondent observed, “Many hamlets and towns have been destroyed during the war, Alexandria has most suffered. It has been in the uninterrupted possession of the Federals. . . . Alexandria is filled with ruined people; they walk as strangers through their ancient streets, and their property is no longer theirs to possess. . . . these things ensued, as the natural results of civil war; and one’s sympathies were everywhere enlisted for the poor, the exiled, and the bereaved.” This book graphically portrays the scenes of war and occupation.

Alexandria: 1861–1865, by Charles A. Mills and Andrew L. Mills, is a compilation of rare Civil War–era photographs from the Library of Congress and the private collections of Alexandria’s William Francis Smith and Mollie Somerville. Smith began collecting photographs as a boy and specialized in 19th-century views. Somerville was secretary to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Charles A. Mills is the author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Echoes of Manassas and Treasure Legends of the Civil War. Andrew L. Mills is a history teacher and host of the cable TV show Virginia Time Travel.

Into the Valley: A History and Tour Guide of Civil War in the Shennandoah Valley, 1861-1865

by Jim Miles

From the publisher:
The Shenandoah Valley-the mere name sounds enchanting, and its beauty and bounty have captivated the imagination of Americans for 300 years. During the four years of the Civil War, what was once an amazing geological attraction became a vital strategic asset. Possession of the Valley by the Confederacy meant an invasion route into the heart of Maryland and Pennsylvania and to the backdoor of Washington, D.C. In Union hands, the Confederacy would lose a valuable railroad, the agricultural produce of the Valley, and protection from attack via the many gaps through the mountains of Virginia.

Great generals, including Stonewall Jackson, Philip H. Sheridan, John C. Breckinridge, George A. Custer, and Jubal Early, fought desperate battles to control the Shenandoah. Armies marched rapidly and maneuvered brilliantly between green mountains and along the sparkling waters of the Shenandoah River, called Daughter of the Stars by Native Americans. The area was devastated by total war-hundreds of farms and tons of food were wantonly torched.

Into the Valley is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of every campaign that occurred in the Valley during four years of combat. The tour guides explore every battle, road, and mountain gap used by the armies and examines the charming, historic attractions of the Shenandoah, its towns and villages, mansions and mills, churches and cemeteries, monuments and museums.

The book contains hundreds of period photographs and drawings. It also is filled with modern photographs that richly illustrate the driving tours, original battle maps, fascinating sidebar articles, a chronology of key events, sources for additional travel information, a bibliography, and an index.

JIM MILES is a seasoned battlefield explorer, author, historian, and teacher who has written more than one hundred articles and several books on Southern history, archaeology, and the Civil War. The author of the best-selling Weird Georgia, Miles lives in Warner Robbins, Georgia.

Three Days in the Shenandoah: Stonewall Jackson at Front Royal and Winchester

by Gary Ecelbarger

From the publisher:
The battles of Front Royal and Winchester are the stuff of Civil War legend. Stonewall Jackson swept away an isolated Union division under the command of Nathaniel Banks and made his presence in the northern Shenandoah Valley so frightful a prospect that it triggered an overreaction from President Lincoln, yielding huge benefits for the Confederacy. Gary Ecelbarger has undertaken a comprehensive reassessment of those battles to show their influence on both war strategy and the continuation of the conflict. Three Days in the Shenandoah answers questions that have perplexed historians for generations.

Gary Ecelbarger, an independent scholar, is the author of Black Jack Logan: An Extraordinary Life in Peace and War and "We Are in for It!": The First Battle of Kernstown, March 23, 1862.

Ninth Vermont Infantry: A History and Roster

by Paul G. Zeller

From the publisher:
This work follows the Ninth Vermont from the horrors of its first combat and humiliating capture at Harpers Ferry in September 1862 to its triumphal march into Richmond in April 1865. Through diaries and letters written by members of the unit, one relives the riveting day-by-day account of the men as they were in battle, on the march, and in camp. With seldom seen photos of many of the regiment’s members, detailed maps, and a complete regimental roster, this book tells a compelling story.

Paul G. Zeller is also the author of The Second Vermont Volunteer Infantry Regiment, 1861–1865 (2002). A retired United States Army Reserve colonel, he lives in Williamstown, Vermont.

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters

by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

From the publisher:
Robert E. Lee’s war correspondence is well known, and here and there personal letters have found their way into print, but the great majority of his most intimate messages have never been made public. These letters reveal a far more complex and contradictory man than the one who comes most readily to the imagination, for it is with his family and his friends that Lee is at his most candid, most engaging, and most vulnerable. Over the past several years historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor has uncovered a rich trove of unpublished Lee materials that had been held in both private and public collections.

Her new book, a unique blend of analysis, narrative, and historiography, presents dozens of these letters in their entirety, most by Lee but a few by family members. Each letter becomes a departure point for an essay that shows what the letter uniquely reveals about Lee’s time or character. The material covers all aspects of Lee’s life—his early years, West Point, his work as an engineer, his relationships with his children and his slaves, his decision to join the South, his thoughts on military strategy, and his disappointments after defeat in the Civil War. The result is perhaps the most intimate picture to date of Lee, one that deftly analyzes the meaning of his actions within the context of his personality, his relationships, and the social tenor of his times.

"... his letters and Pryor's analysis reinforce our appreciation of Lee's best qualities, including his personal warmth, devotion to friends and family, and sense of fairness." - Booklist

"Pryor moves onto important historical and interpretive terrain with a far more discerning and critical eye than most of her scholarly or popular predecessors." - New Republic

From CWBN:
This is the first softcover edition of a previously released hardback.

Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War

by Gary W. Gallagher

From the publisher:
More than 60,000 books have been published on the Civil War. Most Americans, though, get their ideas about the war—why it was fought, what was won, what was lost—not from books but from movies, television, and other popular media. In an engaging and accessible survey, renowned Civil War historian Gary Gallagher guides readers through the stories told in recent film and art, showing how they have both reflected and influenced the political, social, and racial currents of their times. Too often these popular portrayals overlook many of the very ideas that motivated the generation that fought the war. The most influential perspective for the Civil War generation, says Gallagher, is almost entirely absent from the Civil War stories being told today.

Gallagher argues that popular understandings of the war have been shaped by four traditions that arose in the nineteenth century and continue to the present: the Lost Cause, in which Confederates are seen as having waged an admirable struggle against hopeless odds; the Union Cause, which frames the war as an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions; the Emancipation Cause, in which the war is viewed as a struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and eliminate a cancerous influence on American society; and the Reconciliation Cause, which represents attempts by northern and southern whites to extol "American" virtues and mute the role of African Americans.

Gallagher traces an arc of cinematic interpretation from one once dominated by the Lost Cause to one now celebrating Emancipation and, to a lesser degree, Reconciliation. In contrast, the market for art among contemporary Civil War enthusiasts reflects an overwhelming Lost Cause bent. Neither film nor art provides sympathetic representations of the Union Cause, which, Gallagher argues, carried the most weight in the Civil War era.

This lively investigation into what popular entertainment teaches us and what it reflects about us will prompt readers to consider how we form opinions on current matters of debate, such as the use of the military, the freedom of dissent, and the flying of the Confederate flag.

Gary W. Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author or editor of numerous books, including Lee and His Army in Confederate History and The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864.

Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society

by Eric Burin

From the publisher:
"An exceptional work that will stand for years as the best study of the African colonization movement. Burin's insights into this often misunderstood idea will be appreciated by all historians of the early national era. The research, both archival and secondary, is excellent."--Douglas Egerton, Le Moyne College

"Burin adds significantly to our understanding of the world view of slaveholding colonizationists, of their negotiations with prospectively freed people, and of their struggle with proslavery critics of colonization. . . . Historians of proslavery thought will find new ideas and information here."--Torrey Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary’s College

From the early 1700s through the late 1800s, many whites advocated removing blacks from America. The American Colonization Society (ACS) epitomized this desire to deport black people. Founded in 1816, the ACS championed the repatriation of black Americans to Liberia in West Africa. Supported by James Madison, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and other notables, the ACS sent thousands of black emigrants to Liberia. In examining the ACS’s activities in America and Africa, Eric Burin assesses the organization’s impact on slavery and race relations.

Burin focuses on ACS manumissions—that is, instances wherein slaves were freed on the condition that they go to Liberia. In doing so, he provides the first account of the ACS that covers the entire South throughout the antebellum era. He investigates everyone involved in the society’s affairs, from the emancipators and freedpersons at the center to the colonization agents, free blacks, southern jurists, newspaper editors, neighboring whites, proslavery ideologues, northern colonizationists, and abolitionists on the periphery. In mixing a panoramic view of ACS operations with close-ups on individual participants, Burin presents a unique, bifocal perspective on the ACS.

Although colonization leaders initially envisioned their program as a pacific enterprise, in reality the push-and-pull among emancipators, freedpersons, and others rendered ACS manumissions logistically complex, financially troublesome, legally complicated, and at times socially disruptive enterprises. Like pebbles dropped in water, ACS manumissions rippled outward, destabilizing slavery in their wake. Based on extensive archival research and a database of 11,000 ACS emigrants, Burin’s study offers new insights concerning the origins, intentions, activities, and fate of the colonization movement.

Eric Burin is assistant professor of history at the University of North Dakota.

The Stonewall Brigade in the Civil War

by Steve Smith

From the publisher:
This book describes the First Virginia--Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jacksons Brigade--in combat from first mustering to bitter end, when only 210 ragged and footsore soldiers remained of the 6,000 who'd served through the Civil War.

Included are detailed order of battle charts, tables of organization and equipment, technical specifications of the brigades weapons, and special sidebars on the units commanders.

Color maps illustrate the brigades major battles; and a combination of vintage photographs, new images of contemporary re-enactors, and Civil War-era paintings and drawings helps to bring the Stonewall Brigade to life.

Steve Smith started out in military publishing more than 20 years ago and his career has included work as author, editor, and publisher. He founded the military history publishing company Sarpedon, and has written many books on 20th century military topics under his own name—most recently 2nd Armored Division: Hell on Wheels—and Civil War titles under a pseudonym. He is currently managing editor for a military history publishing company.

Immortal Captives: The Story of Six Hundred Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy

by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn

From the publisher:
“Some of the boys had no blankets, and we all slept on bare boards. It was so cold that the boys who had no blankets had to walk all night to keep from freezing . . . It seems to me that I can hear those poor fellows yet—walking, walking up and down on that brick floor.” — Maj. David B. Coulter, Twelfth Arkansas Infantry

Through the private letters, written testimonies, and journal entries of hundreds of Confederate officers, Mauriel Phillips Joslyn provides a moving and heartbreaking account of the six hundred Confederate soldiers who suffered in Union custody. After Lincoln and his war council dissolved the prisoner exchange program in 1864, the North used captured officers from all states in the seceded South to set an example to the remaining Confederacy.

Malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies took a terrible toll, and the officers, who were denied medical care, slowly starved during the hard winter months. After a rumor that Yankee soldiers were shot by their own army, the Union deliberately placed fifty Confederate prisoners in a stockade at Charleston Harbor. Forced under the artillery fire of their own comrades, these Southern heroes suffered mercilessly and unjustly in Northern hands. The last of the surviving six hundred Confederate officers were not released until several months after the end of the Civil War.

Mauriel Phillips Joslyn was born in Manchester, Georgia, and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in history. While living in Virginia, Joslyn and her family participated in numerous Civil War reenactments. She also lectures and gives presentations on military history while dressed in full Confederate costume. Joslyn is the author of Confederate Women, published by Pelican, and has been published in Gettysburg Magazine, Military Heritage, Georgia Journal, and Irish Sword. She lives in Sparta, Georgia, where she and her family restored their 182-year-old home.

John Washington's Civil War: A Slave Narrative

by Crandall Shifflett

From the publisher:
In 1872, just seven years after his emancipation, a thirty-four-year-old former slave named John Washington penned the story of his life, calling it "Memorys of the Past." One hundred and twenty years later, in the early 1990s, historian Crandall Shifflett stumbled upon Washington's forgotten manuscript at the Library of Congress while researching Civil War Fredericksburg. Over the ensuing decade, Shifflett sought to learn more about this Virginia slave and the people and events he so vividly portrays. John Washington's Civil War presents this remarkable slave narrative in its entirety, together with Shifflett's detailed annotations on the life-changing events Washington records.

While joining the canon of better-known slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, Washington's account illuminates a far different world. The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, Washington never lived outside the seventy-five-mile radius that included Richmond and Fredericksburg, until his emancipation. His narrative spans his experiences as a household slave, a laborer in the Fredericksburg tobacco factory, and a hotel servant on the eve of the Civil War. He also tells of his bold venture across Union lines and his experiences as a slave under Union officers.

Washington's recollections allow for a singular look at the more personal aspects of slave life. Forced attendance at the slaveowner's church, much-anticipated gatherings of neighboring slaves at harvesttime, even a brief episode of courtship among slaves are among the events described in this remarkable narrative. On a broader scale, Washington was a witness to key moments of the Civil War, and his chronicle includes his thoughts about the wider political turmoil surrounding him, including his dramatic account of watching the Union Army mass around Fredericksburg as it prepared to invade the town. An excellent introduction and expert annotations by Shifflett reconstruct Washington's life through his death in 1918 and provide informative historical background and context to Washington's recollections.

An unprecedented window into the life of a Virginia bondsman, John Washington's Civil War communicates with real urgency what it meant to be a slave during a period of extreme crisis that sounded the notes of freedom for some and the end of a way of life for others.

Crandall Shifflett is a professor of history at Virginia Tech University. He is also the author of Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, Virginia, 1860-1900, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960, and Victorian America, 1876 to 1913.

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

A Confederate Legend: Berry Benson in War and Peace

by Edward J. Cashin

From the publisher:
If anyone can be said to have lived his life as a legend, it was Berry Benson. As a lad growing up in Hamburg, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia., he loved the nearby ponds and woods, and read stories of adventure. Part poet, part warrior, he viewed the Civil War as the supreme adventure. He measured himself against men who seemed to him to personify the chivalric ideals he had read about. His exploits became the stuff of legend.

On a night scout behind enemy lines, he stole a colonel’s horse from in front of the colonel’s tent. Captured twice on these scouting forays, he escaped twice, the second time by an impossibly long and meandering tunnel out of the infamous Elmira Prison. On his return through enemy lines, he climbed atop a cattle train and chatted companionably with a Union soldier. He declined to surrender at Appomattox,and brought his rifle home with him.

Because he lived up to his highest ideals during the war,he devoted his post-war career to worthy causes. He tried to save the besieged black militiamen from being killed by an angry white crowd. He sided with the textile strikers, even though he worked for the local mills as an accountant. He braved intense anti-Semitism in an attempt to save the life of Jewish Leo Frank.

When the Ladies Memorial Association needed a model for the Confederate soldier atop the lofty monument on Augusta’s main thoroughfare, they chose Berry Benson. His image, like those of the four Confederate generals below him, represent another legend, that of the Lost Cause.

EDWARD J. CASHIN†, a native of Augusta and a graduate of Fordham University, focused most of his research on topics relating to Georgia and the Southeast. His twenty-some books include The Kings Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier, Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader, and the Shaping of the Southern Colonial Frontier, and William Bartram and the American Revolution on the SouthernFrontier. He retired as chairman of the History department at Augusta State University in 1996 to become director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History until his death in 2007.

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

The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates after West Point

by Ralph Kirshner

From the publisher:
Ralph Kirshner has provided a richly illustrated forum to enable the West Point class of 1861 to write its own autobiography. Through letters, journals, and published accounts, George Armstrong Custer, Adelbert Ames, and their classmates tell in their own words of their Civil War battles and varied careers after the war.

“Ralph Kirshner captures the exciting and thought-provoking stories of selected classmates as their character is tested in the fiery crucible of the Civil War. Equally important is the attention given to certain of the classmates’ postwar careers as politicians, soldiers, explorers, diplomats, and engineers.” — Edwin Bearss, Historian Emeritus, National Park Service

From CWBN:
This is the first paperback edition of a hardcover book. We were not aware of it in February when it was released.

Fire in the Cane Field: The Federal Invasion of Louisiana and Texas, January 1861-January 1863

by Donald S. Frazer

From the publisher:
Helen Dupuy, a French-speaking teenager living at the Sleepy Hollow Plantation on Bayou Lafourche, Louisiana, noted with horror the coming of invaders. "The first Yankee gunboats passed Donaldsonville May 4 at 11 A.M.," she wrote in her diary. Her home lay just a few miles from the Mississippi River, and word quickly arrived that Union sailors were confiscating sugar, cotton, and other contraband of war. The realities of her new situation soon became apparent—and ominous: "Then began the most awful pillaging."

Award-winning author Donald S. Frazier returns to the field of Civil War history with keen turn of phrase and enthralling story-telling with the release of Fire in the Cane Field: The Federal Invasion of Louisiana and Texas, January 1861-January 1863. Beginning with the spasms of secession in the Pelican State, Frazier weaves a stirring tale of bravado, reaction, and war as he describes the consequences of disunion for the hapless citizens of Louisiana. The army and navy campaigns he portrays weave a tale of the Federal Government's determination to suppress the newborn Confederacy—and nearly succeeding—by putting ever-increasing pressure on its adherents from New Orleans to Galveston. The surprising triumph of Texan troops on their home soil in early 1863 proved to be a decisive reverse to Union ambitions and doomed the region to even bloodier destruction to come.

This bracing new work, ten years in the making, will usher in a chronological string of four books on the Civil War in Louisiana and Texas as Frazier presents fresh sources on new topics in a series of captivating narratives. Titles to follow in his innovative Louisiana quadrille include Thunder Across the Swamp: The Fight for the Lower Mississippi, February 1863-May 1863; Blood on the Bayou: The Campaigns of Tom Green's Texans, June 1863-February 1864; and Death at the Landing: The Contest for the Red River and the Collapse of Confederate Louisiana, March 1864-June 1865.

Donald S. Frazier is Professor of History at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, and author of Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest, published by Texas A&M University Press. His other works include Cottonclads: The Battle of Galveston and the Defense of the Texas Coast, an edited work, The U.S. and Mexico at War: Nineteenth Century Expansionism and Conflict, and as co-author Frontier Texas: History of a Borderland 1780–1880 and The Texas You Expect: The Story of the Buffalo Gap Historic Village.

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

A note to readers

As you will have noticed, the last and first days of the month are crowded with releases. There is, however, an odd gap of 10 days before the next ACW title comes out. In that time, we will be posting information about books scheduled for April release with no day specified; we will also catch up with a few titles we missed in January and February.

The Disagreement: A Novel

by Nick Taylor

From the publisher:
It is April 17, 1861 -- the day that Virginia secedes from the Union and the sixteenth birthday of John Alan Muro. As the Commonwealth erupts in celebration, young Muro sees his dream of attending medical school in Philadelphia shattered by the sudden reality of war.

Muro's father, believing that the Disagreement will pass, sends his son instead to Charlottesville. Jefferson's forty-year-old University of Virginia has become a haven of rogues and dilettantes, among them Muro's roommate, Braxton Baucom III, a planter's son who attempts to strike a resemblance to General "Stonewall" Jackson. Though the pair toasts lightheartedly "To our studies!" with a local corn whiskey known as "The Bumbler," the war effort soon exerts a sobering influence. Medical students like Muro are pressed into service at the Charlottesville General Hospital, where the inexperienced Dr. Muro saves the life of a Northern lieutenant, earning the scorn of his peers.

As the war progresses, Muro takes up yet another cause -- winning the affections of the beguiling Miss Lorrie Wigfall. Here, too, Muro faces a cunning adversary. Just as the fighting is closing in, Muro is forced to make a choice that will shape the rest of his life. In this story of love, loyalty, and unimaginable sacrifice, a doctor struggles to balance the passions of youth with the weight of responsibility.

"Nick Taylor's vivid characters and powerful descriptions tell a compelling story that captures the voices, beauty, and tumult at the University of Virginia during the Civil War." -- John T. Casteen, III, president, University of Virginia

"I loved Nick Taylor's gutsy prose; even at its most lyrical, it never fails to offer a particularly evocative glimpse of a troubling time. Here is a story about our soul-destroying fratricidal war that uses the narrowest of prisms to offer a wider vision. A genuine accomplishment." -- Beverly Swerling, author of City of Dreams and City of Glory

"At its best, historical fiction reveals the truth or reality of the past. Nick Taylor has achieved this in his very fine book. Taylor has chosen to see the Civil War's human wreckage through the eyes of a young Confederate surgeon at a hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. The result is a compelling and moving novel." -- Jeffry D. Wert, Civil War historian

Guide to Missouri Confederate Units

by James E. McGh

From the publisher:
Tracing the origins and history of Missouri Confederate units that served during the Civil War is nearly as difficult as comprehending the diverse politics that produced them.

Deeply torn by the issues that caused the conflict, some Missourians chose sides enthusiastically, others reluctantly, while a number had to choose out of sheer necessity, for fence straddling held no sway in the state after the fighting began.

The several thousand that sided with the Confederacy formed a variety of military organizations, some earning reputations for hard fighting exceeded by few other states, North or South. Unfortunately, the records of Missouri's Confederate units have not been adequately preserved--officially or otherwise--until now.

James E. McGhee is a highly respected and widely published authority on the Civil War in Missouri; the scope of this book is startling, the depth of detail gratifying, its reliability undeniable, and the unit narratives highly readable.

McGhee presents accounts of the sixty-nine artillery, cavalry, and infantry units in the state, as well as their precedent units, and those that failed to complete their organization. Relying heavily on primary sources, such as rosters, official reports, order books, letters, diaries, and memoirs, he weaves diverse materials into concise narratives of each of Missouri's Confederate organizations. He lists the field-grade officers for battalions and regiments, companies and company commanders, and places of origin for each company when known.

In addition to listing all the commanding officers in each unit, he includes a bibliography germane to the unit, while a supplemental bibliography provides the other sources used in preparing this unique and comprehensive resource.

African-American Activism before the Civil War: A Reader on the Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North

by Patrick Rael

From the publisher:
Historians have long understood that racial oppression in American history was about more than slavery. On the eve of the Civil War, over five per cent of the nation's 4.5 million African Americans lived outside of bondage in the nominally 'free' states of the Union. These African Americans exercised a power in national discussions over slavery that far outstripped their number in the population. Their efforts at community building and radical protest were one force that helped bring the nation to the brink of Civil War, and ultimately led to the extinction of slavery.

African-American Activism before the Civil War is the first to gather together scholarly essays published from 1965 to the present on the role of African Americans and race in the struggle for equality in the northern states before the Civil War. Many of these essays are already known as classics in the field, and others are well on their way to becoming definitive in a still evolving field. Here, in one place, anchored by a comprehensive, analytical introduction discussing the historiography of antebellum black activism, the best scholarship on this crucial minority of African American activists can now be studied together.

Devil's Game: The Civil War Intrigues of Charles A. Dunham

by Carman Cumming

From the publisher:
Devil's Game traces the amazing career of Charles A. Dunham, Civil War spy, forger, journalist, and master of dirty tricks. Writing for a variety of New York papers under alternate names, Dunham routinely faked stories, created new identities, and later boldly cast himself to play those roles. He achieved his greatest infamy when he was called to testify in Washington concerning Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Many parts of Dunham's career remain shadowy, but Cumming offers the first detailed tour of Dunham's convoluted, high-stakes, international deceits, including his effort to sell Lincoln on plans for a raid to capture Jefferson Davis.

Exhaustively researched and unprecedented in depth, this carefully crafted assessment of Dunham's motives, personality, and the complex effects of his schemes changes assumptions about covert operations during the Civil War.

Carman Cumming worked as a reporter and editor in Canada and the United States before becoming a journalism professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. His publications include Secret Craft: The Journalism of Edward Farrer and Sketches from a Young Country: The Images of Grip Magazine.

Fear in North Carolina: The Civil War Journals and Letters of the Henry Family

by Karen L. Clinard and Richard Russell (compilers)

From the publisher:
Cornelia Henry's three journals, written between 1860 and 1868, offer an excellent source for daily information on western North Carolina during the Civil War period.

Karen L. Clinard, a lifelong resident of southeastern Michigan, now concentrates her energies on genealogy research and historical studies. Richard Russell, a native of Watervliet, Michigan, now resides in Asheville, North Carolina. After 30 years in the pharmacy profession, Russell built on his passion for historical research and documentation when he established Reminiscing Books in 2006.

1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See

by Bruce Chadwick

From the publisher:
1858 explores the events and personalities of the year that would send the Americas North and South on a collision course culminating in the slaughter of 630,000 of the nations young men, a greater number than died in any other American conflict. The record of that year is told in seven separate stories, each participant, though unaware, is linked to the oncoming tragedy by the central, though ineffective, figure of that time, the man in the White House, President James Buchanan.

The seven figures who suddenly leap onto historys stage and shape the great moments to come are: Jefferson Davis, who lived a life out of a Romantic novel, and who almost died from herpes simplex of the eye; the disgruntled Col. Robert E. Lee, who had to decide whether he would stay in the military or return to Virginia to run his familys plantation; William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the great Union generals, who had been reduced to running a roadside food stand in Kansas; the uprising of eight abolitionists in Oberlin, Ohio, who freed a slave apprehended by slave catchers, and set off a fiery debate across America; a dramatic speech by New York Senator William Seward in Rochester, which foreshadowed the civil war and which seemed to solidify his hold on the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination; John Browns raid on a plantation in Missouri, where he freed several slaves, and marched them eleven hundred miles to Canada, to be followed a year later by his catastrophic attack on Harpers Ferry; and finally, Illinois Senator Steven Douglas seven historic debates with little-known Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois Senate race, that would help bring the ambitious and determined Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States.

As these stories unfold, the reader learns how the country reluctantly stumbled towards that moment in April 1861 when the Southern army opened fire on Fort Sumter.

Former journalist Chadwick (The General and Mrs. Washington) deals with much more than the previously underappreciated year of 1858 in this engagingly written book. By focusing on the men who drove crucial historical events, Chadwick provides plenty of pre-1858 background to make his case that the events of that year changed the lives of dozens of important people and within a few short years, the history of the nation. - Publishers Weekly

Civil War in New Bern & Fort Macon, North Carolina

by Drew Pullen

From the publisher:
This book describes the period after capturing Confederate positions on Hatteras Island and Roanoke Island, when the loyal Union soldiers directed their attention to the town of New Bern, located on North Carolina's mainland. As a strategically important port of Neuse River, New Bern also served as a railroad centre -- meaning that its capture could allow the Union forces to control territory near the major supply line for Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. New Bern's Confederate forces were understaffed and inadequately prepared to face the Federal assault. The fall of New Bern enabled Union forces to proceed to the small coastal town of Beaufort and lay siege to Fort Macon, thus confirming New Bern's infamous place in history.

From CWBN:
This book is carried in Britain, Canada and New Zealand with a publication date of November 2007 and given an "out of stock" status. Stateside, Amazon shows it being published on 30 March 2008 while Barnes & Noble do not list it at all. The title appears in a picture-oriented North Carolina series.

The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861-1865

by Andrew E. Masich

From the publisher:
Bull Run, Gettysburg, Appomattox. For Americans, these battlegrounds, all located in the eastern United States, will forever be associated with the Civil War. But few realize that the Civil War was also fought far to the west of these sites. The westernmost battle of the war took place in the remote deserts of the future state of Arizona.

In this first book-length account of the Civil War in Arizona, Andrew E. Masich chronicles the all-but-forgotten story of the California Column, volunteer soldiers who served in the U.S. Army from 1861 to 1866 and played a key role in creating and shaping Arizona Territory.

The Civil War in Arizona is divided into two parts: a lively narrative history of the California Column in wartime Arizona, followed by a rare compilation of letters - originally published in the popular newspaper Alta California - written by the volunteer soldiers themselves. Enriched by Masich's meticulous annotation, these letters provide firsthand testimony of the grueling desert conditions the soldiers endured as they fought on many fronts, not the least of which was an uncaring army command structure preoccupied with war in the East.

Traitors: The Secession Period November 1860 - July 1861

by Edward S. Cooper

From the publisher:
A myth has grown that there were no traitors during the period leading up to the American Civil War. Edward S. Cooper debunks that myth in this book.

He provides documentation that officers on active duty in the army and navy of the United States secretly negotiated for positions in the Confederacy, surrendered their ships, forts, and posts to state authorities, conspired in the seizure of other forts, deserted their posts and advised their subordinates to join them, and wrote letters detailing how the Confederacy could defeat the very army and navy in which they were serving.

Members of the president's cabinet ensured southern arsenals were stocked with northern weapons, posted southern sympathizers to forts and arsenals in the south, and sold weapons to agents for states that had announced their intention to secede. Other cabinet members urged states to secede and gave southern states advance notice of United States troop movements. Members of the United States Congress, collectively and individually, used their positions to warn southern states of Federal troop movements, obtain plans of arsenals and forts and how they were manned, and acquire lists of military officers along with their pay in order to seduce them into Confederate service. The governors of some slave-holding states had men seize forts and arsenals, burned bridges to impede the movement of Federal troops, and allowed Confederate troops into their states before they had seceded or even called conventions to consider secession.

George F. Root, Civil War Songwriter: A Biography

by P. H. Carder

From the publisher:
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” became perhaps the most common patriotic song echoing throughout the North. The author of that famous tune was George F. Root, and his many other patriotic songs established him as “the musician of the people.”

Beginning with his earliest days as a child prodigy, this biography follows Root closely through his prewar career as a popular composer, his wartime role as a patriotic songwriter, and his postwar songwriting endeavors. His later songs document such events as the settling of the West, the assassination of President Lincoln, the literature and humor of his day, and the many reform movements that defined the values of that era. His biography reveals how he became the musician of the people and how his critics responded nationally.

P.H. Carder is retired from the music department of Silver Burdett Company. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Causes of the Civil War: The Political, Cultural, Economic and Territorial Disputes Between the North and South

by Paul Calore

From the publisher:
While South Carolina's preemptive strike on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's subsequent call to arms started the Civil War, South Carolina's secession and Lincoln's military actions were simply the last in a line of volatile events which began as early as 1619.

Increasing moral conflicts over the issue of slavery and constant political debates regarding its existence—exacerbated by the inequities inherent between an established agricultural society and a growing industrial one—led to a fierce sectionalism which manifested itself through cultural, economic, political and territorial disputes.

This volume reduces sectionalism to its most fundamental form, examining the underlying source of this antagonistic climate. From protective tariffs to the expansionist agenda, it illustrates the ways in which the foremost issues of the time influenced relations between the North and the South. State sovereignty and the interpretation of congressional and constitutional powers play major parts in this concise narrative on the antebellum politics that inadvertently nurtured the growth of sectional conflicts and contributed to the inevitability of war.

Paul Calore was an operations branch chief with the Defense Logistics Agency of the Department of Defense before retiring. In addition to writing on the causes of the Civil War, he has written books about its naval and land campaigns. He is a supporting member of the U.S. Civil War Center and the Civil War Preservation Trust, and lives in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Beneath a Northern Sky: A Short History of the Gettysburg Campaign

by Steven Woodworth

From the publisher:
Of all the places and events in this nation's history, Gettysburg may well be the name best known to Americans. In Beneath a Northern Sky, eminent Civil War historian Steven E. Woodworth offers a balanced and thorough overview of the entire battle, its drama, and its meaning. From Lee's decision to take his heretofore successful Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac and into Pennsylvania to the withdrawal of the battle-battered Confederate's back across the river into Virginia, Woodworth paints a vivid picture of this pivotal campaign. Instead of focusing on only one aspect of the Gettysburg Campaign as most other books do, Beneath a Northern Sky tells the tale of the entire battle in a richly detailed but swiftly moving narrative. This new approach to a defining battle is sure to fascinate Civil War buffs and all those interested in the rich history of the United States.

The volume is illustrated with b&w photographs and diagrams of the battle. Woodworth teaches history at Texas Christian University.

For those with time to read only one book about Gettysburg, this is the one.
- James M. McPherson

From CWBN:
This is the first paperback edition of a hardcover book.

West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War

by Heather Cox Richardson

From the publisher:
The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. Instead, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners gradually hammered out a national identity that united three regions into a country that could become a world power. Ultimately, the story of Reconstruction is about how a middle class formed in America and how its members defined what the nation would stand for, both at home and abroad, for the next century and beyond.

A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book stretches the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction. Historian Heather Cox Richardson ties the North and West into the post–Civil War story that usually focuses narrowly on the South, encompassing the significant people and events of this profoundly important era.

By weaving together the experiences of real individuals—from a plantation mistress, a Native American warrior, and a labor organizer to Andrew Carnegie, Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, and Sitting Bull—who lived during the decades following the Civil War and who left records in their own words, Richardson tells a story about the creation of modern America.

This thoughtful, engaging examination of the Reconstruction Era began as a way for author and historian Richardson to understand the deep divide-over issues like taxes, size of government and the influence of special interests-that still separate "red states" from "blue states." Richardson's persuasive thesis is that the Reconstruction, rather than the Civil War itself, is the place to look for guidance through these thorny problems. - Publishers Weekly

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North. She lives in Winchester, MA.

The Maryland Campaign by Carman and Pierro

From CWBN:
The winding road to publication for Joseph Pierro's Ezra Carman manuscript has not passed its last bend yet (see previous posts here, here, and here).

Publisher Routledge lists the tome as out on March 18; Joseph Pierro writes to say he has had his copies for two weeks; meanhwile, Amazon is stuck in pre-order mode as if the book is yet to be released.

On the silver lining side, Amazon adds a further 5% discount to pre-ordered books, so "pre-ordering" from their site now will compound the discounts to produce the cheapest opportunity to buy what might otherwise be book beyond many budgets.

We had posted the publisher's information on this title earlier; please see links at top of post.

Cross-posted to Civil War Bookshelf.

Unfurl Those Colors: McClellan, Sumner, and the Second Army Corps in the Antietam Campaign

by Marion V. Armstrong Jr.

From the publisher:
A detailed account of the battle of Antietam that clarifies the epic struggle

Unfurl Those Colors! examines the operational fabric of leadership and command in the Army of the Potomac during one of the most critical campaigns and battles of the Civil War. The Battle of Antietam remains "the bloodiest single day of combat in American history" with over 5,000 killed, 20,000 wounded, and 3,000 missing. Many eminent Civil War historians consider it the turning point of the war. As a result of the perceived Federal success at Antietam, Abraham Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation to make the war about ending slavery and terminating any hope of European recognition for the South.

This book constitutes an operational study of the Army of the Potomac during this campaign and battle, carefully documenting the command decisions of army commander George B. McClellan and following the execution of those decisions through the corps level of command and down to the ordinary soldier in the Second Army Corps. It reappraises the leadership and decisions of Edwin V. Sumner during the battle of Antietam as the one federal corps commander who was steadfast in carrying out McClellan's plan of battle and effectively directed the battle on the Federal right. It details as no previous account has the fighting of the Second Army Corps at Antietam to include Sedgwick's division in the West Woods and French's and Richardson's divisions at Bloody Land.

"Unfurl Those Colors! is a very important contribution to the field of Civil War and military history. While a number of significant books have been written on the Battle of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign, none have narrowed down a particular phase as this book does." — Ted Alexander, Chief Historian at Antietam National Battlefield Park and a Smithsonian Associates tour guide specializing in Civil War sites

"Marion Armstrong has a done a good job examining the generalship at Antietam. This is a terrific book." — John Michael Priest, noted author of books on Antietam and teacher at South Hagerstown High School in Boonsboro, Maryland

Marion V. Armstrong Jr. is a retired U.S. Army reserve officer and teaches history at colleges in middle Tennessee.

Weary of War: Life on the Confederate Home Front

by Joe A. Mobley

From CWBN:
Providing a fresh look at a crucial aspect of the American Civil War, this new study explores the day-to-day life of people in the Confederate States of America as they struggled to cope with a crisis that spared no one, military or civilian. Mobley touches on the experiences of everyone on the home front-white and black, male and female, rich and poor, young and old, native and foreign born. He looks at health, agriculture, industry, transportation, refugees city life, religion, education, culture families, personal relationships, and public welfare. In so doing, he offers his perspective on how much the "will of the people" contributed to the final defeat of the Southern cause. Although no single experience was common to all Southerners, a great many suffered poverty, dislocation, and heartbreak. For African Americans, however, the war brought liberation from slavery and the promise of a new life. White women, too, saw their lives transformed as wartime challenges gave them new responsibilities and experiences. Mobley explains how the Confederate military draft, heavy taxes, and restrictions on personal freedoms led to widespread dissatisfaction and cries for peace among Southern folk. He describes the Confederacy as a region of divided loyalties, where pro-Union and pro-Confederate neighbors sometimes clashed violently. This readable, one-volume account of life "behind the lines" will prove particularly useful for students of the conflict.

JOE A. MOBLEY is a former historian and administrator with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. He currently teaches in the Department of History at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. He is the author of a number of books, articles, and book reviews.

From CWBN:
We missed the release of this date on February 28.