Various Things

1. Earlier this week, the ECW website posted an interview with Steven Woodworth and Charles Grear, editors of SIU Press's excellent Civil War Campaigns in the West series. The recently renamed series is one frequently talked about on CWBA, and I've reviewed all of its entries on the site. I'll just repeat a few newsy items from the interview (which you can, and should, read in full at the link above). On the whole, the series still sticks to its long standing release order, but, as noted before, Vicksburg Besieged was published out of sequence. Woodworth and Grear confirm in the interview that the bypassed Fort Henry and Fort Donelson campaign will be up next. Newsworthy also is the announcement that Grear is stepping down from his series co-editing duties and will be replaced by another equally impressive young historian in Jonathan Steplyk.

2. Army of the Potomac constituent formations have become notable exceptions to the traditional rule that corps histories are rare ducks in the Civil War publishing world. In recent years, we've witnessed the release of a two-volume study of the Eleventh Corps as well as a more recent First Corps history. Now comes news of another. Like James Pula's Eleventh Corps set, M. Chris Bryan's Cedar Mountain to Antietam: A Civil War Campaign History of the Union XII Corps, July – September 1862 will be published by Savas Beatie. Covering corps origins through the Battle of Antietam, it is unclear at this point if the author intends to produce multiple volumes (the description does not provide any explicit hints).

3. Though St. Louis often grabs Civil War-era headlines as the preeminent urban center of the U.S.'s existing and emerging West, the region's first and official "Queen City," Cincinnati, Ohio (as an aside, both cities had similar 1860 populations of just over 160,000 souls each), is perhaps too often relegated to the background when it comes to discussing great western contributions to Union victory. That will change to some degree with the upcoming publication of David Mowery's Cincinnati in the Civil War: The Union's Queen City. In the book, Mowery, who many Civil War readers will recognize as the leading modern expert on Morgan's Great Raid, will explore "the many different facets of the Queen City during the war, from the enlistment of the city's area residents in more than 590 Federal regiments and artillery units to the city's production of seventy-eight U.S. Navy gunboats for the nation's rivers." I look forward to reading it.