Booknotes: The Old North State at War

New Arrival:
• The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas by Mark Anderson Moore, with Jessica A. Bandel and Michael Hill (Office of Archives and History - NC Dept of Natural and Cultural Resources, 2015).

A deeply ambitious and exceptionally beautiful atlas of Civil War North Carolina, The Old North State at War is the kind of thing I was hoping would come out of the Sesquicentennial. Mark Moore is one of the leading lights of Civil War cartography and the 99 maps he contributed to the volume are works of art, both incredibly detailed and aesthetically appealing. North Carolina campaigns and battles big and small, cavalry raids, sieges, naval clashes, amphibious landings and guerrilla operations ... they're all in there [see here for map list and table of contents]. Home front issues also closely inhabit the book's pages, with page length sidebars describing elections, politics, slavery, black soldier recruitment, home grown Unionism, profiles of prominent North Carolinians, the war's legacy, and more. In addition to the maps, numerous photographs, charts and tables are inserted with regularity. At 200 11x17 landscape format pages, it's a very large and heavy book (the shipping box said 6 lbs) with a price commensurate with the first rate production values. An interview with Moore will be posted soon.