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Slavery At Sea: Terror, Sex, And Sickness In The Middle Passage, Peter H. Wood

Civil War Book Review

Diving into the Wreck For a century, docile mainstream American historians managed to dismiss race-based enslavement as the central cause of the Civil War -- an amazing feat. And they also managed, for the most part, to avoid looking hard at the huge and long-lived Atlantic Slave Trade. But with ....

The Latino Nineteenth Century, James Wilkey

Civil War Book Review

The Latino Nineteenth Century, presents itself as less a "revision of literary history per se as it is a return to the circuits of texts, print cultures, artists, and institutes [that form] in real and imaginary ways the Latino nineteenth century." The collection of essays assembled here pres....

Editorial: Spring 2017, Tom Barber

Civil War Book Review

Welcome to the CWBR's Spring 2017 issue. This issue's feature reviews cover a wide range of topics that include the Atlantic slave trade, New England Brahmins, prison escapes, and popular memory. William Wagner reviews Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai's Northern Character: College-Educated New Englande....

The Secret Life Of Bacon Tait A White Slave Trader Married To A Free Woman Of Color, Charles B. Dew

Civil War Book Review

Bacon Tait's Secret Life Revealed Archival sources are at the core of almost everything historians do. Private correspondence, business records, autobiographical musings, family oral tradition -- we count on these sorts of materials as we attempt to reconstruct the past. So what do we do when someo....

Reconstruction In Alabama: From Civil War To Redemption In The Cotton South, Justin Behrend

Civil War Book Review

The Rise and Fall of Reconstruction in Alabama On the first page of Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South, we learn that 1905 was the last time a scholarly book was published on the Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. Surely this topic is in need of....

A More Civil War: How The Union Waged A Just War, Burrus Carnahan

Civil War Book Review

Were the Union's War Policies Legal and Moral? In this work the author seeks to explain the "strange paradox of the Civil War: It occasioned both great destruction and remarkable restraint." (p. 3) Based on extensive research in primary and secondary sources, he concludes that the U.S. Army fought....

The Sacred Cause Of Union: Iowa In The Civil War, Jeff Bremer

Civil War Book Review

Civil War Iowa Defined Thomas R. Baker has written the first history of Iowa in the Civil War. Remarkably, no historian has explored the subject until Baker's The Sacred Cause of Union: Iowa in the Civil War. Baker is the associate dean of students at the University of Iowa and not a trai....

Jefferson Davis's Final Campaign: Confederate Nationalism And The Fight To Arm Slaves, David T. Gleeson

Civil War Book Review

Re-Evaluating Confederate Emancipation Phillip Dillard attempts to provide a deeper examination of the Confederate debate to arm slaves than historians have done before. First seriously mooted by Irish immigrant General Pat Cleburne, after the debacle of the Confederate loss at Chattanooga in late....

The Religious Life Of Robert E. Lee, A. James Fuller

Civil War Book Review

At a time when Confederate memorials to him are being removed from public spaces, Robert E. Lee's memory continues to be controversial. In the heated debates over statues of him, much of the myth of Lee created by the Lost Cause still resonates, including his Christianity. Every historian and biogra....

The Loyal West: Civil War And Reunion In Middle America, Matthew Stanley

Civil War Book Review

Interview with Matthew Stanley, author of The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America Interviewed by Tom Barber CWBR: Today the Civil War Book Review is pleased to speak with Matthew E. Stanley, assistant professor of history at Albany State University in Albany, Georgia. Today ....

Annotations, Cwbr Editor

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Gathering To Save A Nation: Lincoln And The Union's War Governors, Mark A. Neels

Civil War Book Review

Mobilizing a Country, Saving a Nation: Lincoln and the War Governors In his manuscript Lincoln and the Union Governors (2013), part of the Concise Lincoln Library with SIU Press, William C. Harris observed that little has been written about President Abraham Lincoln's working relationship wi....

The Thin Light Of Freedom: Civil War And Emancipation In The Heart Of America, Daniel W. Crofts

Civil War Book Review

Before and After Appomattox For the past decade and a half, Edward Ayers devoted himself to administrative duties, first as Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia and then from 2007 to 2015 as the University of Richmond's president. While fine for UVA and Richmond, these arrangeme....

Homicide Justified: The Legality Of Killing Slaves In The United States And The Atlantic World, Mary Block

Civil War Book Review

Homicide: A Matter of Law and Practice In his book, Homicide Justified, Andrew Fede compares slave homicide laws in the slave societies of ancient Rome, the colonial West Indies, British North America, and the United States. Fede, a law partner in a New Jersey firm and an adjunct professor ....

Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers Of Wealth And Populism In America's First Gilded Age, Mark Wilson

Civil War Book Review

Capital versus Democracy, East and West, in the Gilded Age In this first-rate book, Noam Maggor enriches our understanding of American economic and political development in the late nineteenth century. His main characters are elite Bostonians -- the so-called Brahmins -- whose families had become ....

The First Republican Army: The Army Of Virginia And The Radicalization Of The Civil War, Zachery Fry

Civil War Book Review

John Pope, the Army of Virginia, and the Road to Hard War Civil War historians find the political motives behind Union squabbles in the Eastern Theater fascinating. Scholars and lay readers alike can count on a constant barrage of books on the high command of the Army of the Potomac, for instance,....

The Ghosts Of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers In The American West, Bradley Keefer

Civil War Book Review

Heroes from Another Land: Confederate Guerrillas and the making of the Wild West Few events in American history generate as much popular interest and stir up as many conflicting memories as the Civil War and the Wild West. Both produced battles, heroes, villains, victims, drama, and controversy tha....

Occupied Vicksburg, J. Matthew Ward

Civil War Book Review

The Cultural Work of Military Occupation With Occupied Vicksburg, Bradley R. Clampitt contributes a well-researched monograph about Union military occupation in the Confederate South to a field that has been slowly burgeoning over the years. Clampitt skillfully balances heady discussions of ....

Kill Jeff Davis: The Union Raid On Richmond, 1864, Brian Matthew Jordan

Civil War Book Review

Ambition's End: The Union Raid on Richmond, 1864 In late February of 1864, not quite four thousand Union cavalrymen, commanded by the memorably whiskered Brigadier General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, bolted south from Stevensburg, Virginia, on a singular sortie aimed at the Confederate capital. "Beyond....

Civil War Treasures: The Civil War And Reconstruction In A Shakespearean Idiom, Hans Rasmussen

Civil War Book Review

The works and words of William Shakespeare were a common cultural presence in both Great Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century, providing a means for both nations to comprehend a variety of national issues. His influence crossed all social classes through theater performan....

Cwbr Author Interview: Thunder At The Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, Douglas R. Egerton

Civil War Book Review

Interview with Douglas Egerton, author of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America Interviewed by Tom Barber Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is pleased to speak with Douglas Egerton, Professor of History at Le Moyne College and....

Stepping Lively In Place: The Not-Married, Free Women Of Civil-War-Era Natchez, Mississippi, Jean Baker

Civil War Book Review

Spirited Single Women in Mid-Century Natchez Good monographs are like specialty stores: their "goods" are deeply-researched specialized historical evidence that amplifies a subject and offers new information on a particular topic, the corollary of a unique piece of clothing that highlights an outfi....

Poor White Political Identity During Reconstruction (And Beyond), Gary Edwards

Civil War Book Review

The 2016 Presidential election had many unexpected consequences and another that could be added to the list is renewed interest in a comparative historical perspective on the politics of poor white Americans. While this is not an essay about why many rural impoverished whites supported Donald Trump....

Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, And Leadership In The Civil War Era, William Wagner

Civil War Book Review

Patrician Leaders: New England's Men of Character and the Civil War In Northern Character, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai tells the story of an influential cohort of college-educated northerners who served as Union officers during the Civil War and played a leading role in American public life dur....

Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man In The Confederacy, Chris Mackowski

Civil War Book Review

From Infamy to Intrigue: Braxton Bragg Revised One of Earl Hess's great gifts as an author is that he can take a topic we all talk about but which tend to be inglorious -- fortifications, infantry tactics, rifled muskets -- and then creates essential contributions to our Civil War libraries. He has....

Driven From Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis, Carl Moneyhon

Civil War Book Review

Commonalities Considered: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis Driven from Home is a study of the lives of the thousands of North Carolinians, white and black, who became refugees during the Civil War by David Silkenat, a social and cultural historian of the South who is currently a le....

Reflections Of A Civil War Medical Cadet, Burt Green Wilder, Rea Andrew Redd

Civil War Book Review

"February 5 About one o'clock Dr. Marsh came to say that in ward 5 Dr. Hartsuff was to amputate the leg of a man who had be shot in the knee; the joint is shattered and discharges profusely.; he is so weak that he will die unless relieved of the drain. All the surgeons and cadets wer....

Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation Of Progress And Tradition, 2nd Edition, Jeffery Hobson

Civil War Book Review

Southern Progressivism Revisited When the University of Tennessee Press published Dewey Grantham's Southern Progressivism in 1983, scholars warmly welcomed it as the first thorough historical analysis of the subject. In the three decades since, little has changed. In his introduction to this....

Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, And Transatlantic Activism, Mark Summers

Civil War Book Review

Beyond the Water's Edge: Ida B. Wells and the Renewal of Transatlantic Activism In what may have been the darkest period of race relations after the Civil War, the mid-1890s, a flaring light of exposure and protest burst forth when Ida B. Wells published her exposures of lynch law and its connecti....

The Civil War On The Mississippi: Union Sailors, Gunboat Captains, And The Campaign To Control The River, John Schroeder

Civil War Book Review

The Union Navy's Campaign to Control the Mississippi River Although it has received less attention than the major land battles of the Civil War, the Union campaign to control the Mississippi River is well known and recognized as having played an important role in the Union's victory over the Conf....