Booknotes (Aug '15)

New Arrivals:

1. The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 by Kyle S. Sinisi (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

This project has been long in coming and it looks like the wait has been well worth it. Sinisi's book is the first full military treatment of the operation, one of the largest conducted in the Trans-Mississippi theater. A fine looking map set was also commissioned to accompany the work, an important asset given the generally poor state of the cartography in the existing Price Raid literature.

2. A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina: William Francis Allen's Civil War Journals edited by James Robert Hester (USC Pr, 2015).

"During the Civil War, (Allen) served from late 1863 through mid-1864 as a member of the "Gideonite band" of businessmen, missionaries, and teachers who migrated to the South Carolina Sea Islands as part of the Port Royal Experiment. After the war, he served as assistant superintendent of schools in Charleston from April through July 1865. Allen kept journals during his assignments in South Carolina in which he recorded events and impressions of about several hundred people, especially ex-slaves, along with fellow Gideonites, Union soldiers and officials, and ex-Confederates." Hester annotates Allen's journals, which were written through the lens of a trained historian. The editor also provides a short biography in the introduction and covers some of Allen's essay work.