Booknotes II (May '10)

New additions:

1. Union Combined Operations in the Civil War edited by Craig L. Symonds  (Fordham U. Press, 2010).

Symonds has assembled ten case studies of U.S. army-navy combined operations stretching all along the Confederate coastline. Post-war U.S. and international dimensions are also addressed. I should brush up on Rowena Reed again (it's been a while), as apparently several of the essays take a critical look at her seminal work. On the other hand, John Milligan's introduction to the 1993 Bison Books edition of Combined Operations in the Civil War (freely available from google books) summarizes its virtues, as well as the issues and concerns current scholars have with Reed's work, quite well.

2. The Chickamauga Campaign edited by Steven E. Woodworth (SIU Press, 2010).

The second volume from the Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland series, the eight essays assembled here are mostly battlefield analyses of division and corps commander performances from both sides. The new title remains very reasonably priced, with the downside that the series's cartographic shortcomings remain.