[Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier by Matthew M. Stith (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Hardcover, map, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages: 230. ISBN:978-0-8071-6314-6. $42.50] The Civil War as total war has been a topic of discussion on this blog and on many others; not to mention for a long time in publications and among historians. Though Mark Grimsley’s study The Hard Hand War, for…

This isn’t a full blown review of Dr. Frank P. Varney’s book, General Grant and the Rewriting of History, as I just started reading some of it yesterday. I’m jumping the gun here abit as after reading the Preface I could not put the book down. I believe it was Machiavelli who declared that you should judge a leader by those he keeps around him; his lieutenants, ect., the quote…

Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories BY: Ronald S. Coddington Hardcover: 280 pages, 77 halftones Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (August 3, 2004) ISBN-10: 0801878764 ISBN-13: 978-0801878763 This book has obviously been out for a while now and how I came to possess it had nothing to do with the book other than it had a snippet on a soldier in the…

In his 1998 review of Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (by Eric T. Dean, Jr.), James M. McPherson declared that the work “breaks new ground in its analysis of the psychiatric casualties of battle.” Yet since the book’s publishing it has been vastly overlooked by social historians. When researching Civil War historiography one rarely finds Shook Over Hell mentioned when assessing the soldier. Though McPherson…

This was an interesting find today during some Google Book browsing. The Romance of the Civil War was published in 1903 and edited by Albert Bushnell Hart and Elizabeth Stevens. However, the title is a bit misleading. When I first found it I expected the “romantic” nature of late 19th century writing to bring forth an expected confined and yet allusive narrative that would live up to the title. Well,…

Bruce Nichols. Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, Volume 2, 1863. Jefferson: McFarland, 2007. 389 pp. $25.00, ISBN 978-0-7864-2733-8. Bruce Nichols is a defense analyst and Civil War Missouri historian and this is his second book on “Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri,” his first was released by McFarland in 2004. Combine the first two volumes (a third is coming) and they thus far offer a thorough study of all…

Gettysburg: The Last Invasion by Allen C. Guelzo. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Cloth, ISBN: 0307594084. $35.00. I am not a big “battle study” book guy; I have maybe a shelf and a half dedicated to this genre of historiography. It’s not because it is beneath me, but because they are above me. I am not a military historian on that level. I know the general movements of important divisions and…

The 14th Brooklyn Regiment in the Civil War A History and Roster BY: Frank Callenda Regimental histories written today are a labor of love. A thankless task and one that does not pay well — you will never recoup the worth of time and money spent in monetary terms. But once again, that is not why we write them. With that said, Callenda clearly wrote about a group of men…

Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory by Linda Barnickel Hardcover, 320 pages Linda Barnickel is described as “an archivist and freelance writer with master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and The Ohio State University.” Though not possessing a PhD, Barnickel is truly a historian and proves as much with her fine book, Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory. Her work has…