Sunday, February 16, 2020

Book News: The War for Missouri, 1861-1862

As I've mentioned before on more than one occasion, one of my dream projects (to be undertaken by someone else, of course) is a comprehensive history of the Missouri State Guard. In Jim McGhee et al.'s Sterling Price's Lieutenants you'll find an exhaustive look at the Guard's officer corps (along with some organizational history) and Carolyn Bartels (The Forgotten Men: The Missouri State Guard) and Wayne Schnetzer (More Forgotten Men) have both done yeoman work compiling a list of guardsmen who served, but no one has yet attempted a full study of the MSG's extensive early-war operational history. Available soon, however, will be a more limited work of potential interest along these lines.

Currently scheduled for an April release is Joseph W. McCoskrie's The War for Missouri, 1861-1862. The brief description seems to at least suggest that the major focus of the study will be the MSG. Though the format limitations of the series to which it belongs means the treatment can't be much more than an overview, I have hopes that it will possess more than few points of interest and look forward to reading it.

It also reminds me that I still need to pick up a copy of the author's 2017 book The Civil War Missouri Compendium: Almost Unabridged (with Brian Warren). "(A) chronological overview of more than three hundred of the documented engagements that took place within Missouri's borders," it sounds like a useful companion to Bartels's The Civil War in Missouri Day by Day, 1861 to 1865.

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