Booknotes: Embattled Capital

New Arrival:
• Embattled Capital: A Guide to Richmond During the Civil War by Robert M. Dunkerly and Doug Crenshaw (Savas Beatie, 2021).

From the description: "Richmond was home to the Confederate Congress, cabinet, president, and military leadership. And it housed not only the Confederate government but also some of the Confederacy’s most important industry and infrastructure. The city was filled with prisons, hospitals, factories, training camps, and government offices." ... and its "(c)ivilians felt the impact of war in many ways: food shortages, rising inflation, a bread riot, industrial accidents, and eventually, military occupation."

Part of the Emerging Civil War series, Crenshaw and Dunkerly's Embattled Capital: A Guide to Richmond During the Civil War "tells the story of the Confederate capital before, during, and after the Civil War. This guidebook includes a comprehensive list of places to visit: the battlefields around the city, museums, historic sites, monuments, cemeteries, historical preservation groups, and more."

Packed with modern photographs, chapters are a mix of historical narrative and reference lists/guides to Richmond Civil War sites (ex. hospitals, battlefields, prisons, cemeteries, etc.) and units raised from Richmond's citizenry. In the appendix section are essays discussing Gravel Hill (a settlement for freed slaves established in the late 1770s in Henrico County), the essential preservation activities of the Richmond Battlefields Association, and Virginia's secession convention.