New Arrival: • Storming the Heights: A Guide to the Battle of Chattanooga, Revised Second Edition by Matt Spruill (U Tenn Press, 2024). Jay Luvaas and Harold Nelson's The U.S. Army War College Guide series pioneered a Civil War battlefield touring and staff ride format that has stood the test of time. I believe that the most recent volume published under the War College imprimatur was Bowery ..read more

New Arrival: • The Army under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era by Cecily N. Zander (LSU Press, 2024). Given how often the topic is mentioned in the literature, every Civil War reader possesses at the very least a passing recognition of the pre-20th century American public's mistrust of large standing armies and their questioning of the value (and prudence) of nurturing ..read more

New Arrival: • The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859–1939 by Shae Smith Cox (LSU Press, 2024). Academic studies of Civil War material culture are few and far between, but each new one is always welcome in my book. Recognizing that "(m)ilitary uniforms, badges, flags, and other material objects have been used to represent the identity of Americans throughout history ..read more

New Arrival: • Abraham Lincoln and Women in Film: One Hundred Years of Hollywood Mythmaking by Frank J. Wetta & Martin A. Novelli (LSU Press, 2024). In all the years I've been doing this I've never been offered a review copy of a book that examines depictions of the American Civil War on film and television screens. What makes it more surprising is that Google tells me that there are quite ..read more

[Texas Coastal Defense in the Civil War by William Nelson Fox (Arcadia Publishing and The History Press, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:101/159. ISBN:978-1-4671-5561-8. $24.99] Early on in the conflict, the Confederate government in Richmond determined that the ultimate protection of its vast lands and people west of the Mississippi ..read more

New Arrival: • Tabernacles in the Wilderness: The US Christian Commission on the Civil War Battlefront by Rachel Williams (Kent St UP, 2024). When it comes to the private relief organizations of the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission is the first to come to mind. With its elaborate sanitary fairs, close association with the federal government, and tens of millions of dollars ..read more

New Arrival: • The Confederate Navy Medical Corps: Organization, Personnel and Actions by Guy R. Hasegawa (McFarland, 2024). Guy Hasegawa, PharmD has authored or edited a number of important contributions to the scholarly study of Civil War medicine. Those prior works include: Years of Change and Suffering: Modern Perspectives on Civil War Medicine (2009, co-edited with Jim Schmidt), Mending ..read more

New Arrival: • Adelbert Ames, the Civil War, and the Creation of Modern America by Michael J. Megelsh (Kent St UP, 2024). 1861 West Point graduate and Bvt Major General Adelbert Ames fought extensively in the eastern theater with the Army of the Potomac over the first half of the Civil War, receiving a promotion to brigadier general in May 1863. After Gettysburg, Ames was transferred from ..read more

I first posted about US Army Command and General Staff College professor Dan Fullerton's Armies in Gray: The Organizational History of the Confederate States Army in the Civil War way back in 2016. Still in print today, it was published in 2017 and, aside from a couple of reviews, seems to have promptly disappeared from larger notice. I don't recall seeing it in any bibliography yet. My own ..read more

New Arrival: • Virginia Secedes: A Documentary History edited by Dwight T. Pitcaithley (U Tenn Press, 2024). There are now three volumes in Dwight Pitcaithley's edited reference series compiling secession crisis documents by state. Published by University of Tennessee Press, the series started out west with Tennessee Secedes: A Documentary History (2021) and Kentucky and the Secession Crisis: A ..read more