Booknotes: The Guerrilla Hunters

New Arrival:
• The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War
edited by Brian D. McKnight & Barton A. Myers (LSU Press, 2017).

From the spring catalog offerings, this was one of the titles I underlined early on as a must-read. The guerrilla literature has been expanding rapidly in many different directions but much of the focus still remains on the fighters themselves. The initial assumption I had about The Guerrilla Hunters was that it would focus on the other side of the equation, the leaders, men, and units that conducted counter-guerrilla operations. Now that I've seen the actual book, the topics involved appear to be a bit more expansive than that kind of limited categorization. With sixteen chapters plus a foreword and afterword, the volume greatly exceeds the number of contributions (around ten or so) found in the typical Civil War essay anthology.

The table of contents isn't particularly easy to find so here it is:

Foreword NOE
Guerrilla Warfare's Place in the History of the American Civil War MCKNIGHT & MYERS
Partisan Ranger Petitions and the Confederacy's Authorized Petite Guerre Service MYERS
The Power of Shadow and Perception in the Appalachian Theater MCKNIGHT
Nathan Bedford Forrest and Guerrilla War WILLS
Home Rebels Amnesty and Anti-guerrilla Operations in Kentucky in 1864 ROCKENBACH
Hunting Guerrilla Social Networks ASTOR
The Irregular War in Loudoun County Virginia THOMPSON
Reconsidering Guerrilla Leader John Gatewood DOMBY
The Union War on Women FRANK
Guerrilla Warfare and the Environment in the Trans-Mississippi Theater STITH
Irregular Naval Warfare along the Lower Mississippi DAVIS
Whiskey Wild Men and Missouri's Guerrilla War BEILEIN
Larkin M. Skaggs and the Massacres at Lawrence HULBERT
A Spatial Approach to Civil War Missouri's Domestic Supply Line FIALKA
Challenging the Union Citizen-Soldier Ideal LANG
Civil War Guerrillas in a Global Comparative Context HESS
Afterword SUTHERLAND

Also included at the end is a dozen-page 'reader's bibliography' of the guerrilla war literature which should prove useful.