This year's list of military history releases just got more interesting

And we have University Press of Kansas to thank for this development.

Those of us who are interested in such things will hopefully have a copy of Tim Smith's latest Vicksburg Campaign series installment Early Struggles for Vicksburg: The Mississippi Central Campaign and Chickasaw Bayou, October 25-December 31, 1862 in hand by early July (it now has an end of June release date). But that's far from all that UPK has in store for us in 2022.

Those who follow Hampton Newsome on social media have long known about his upcoming project, Gettysburg's Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond (August 2022), and it's now available for preorder. This is exactly the kind of eastern theater military history that I'm looking for at this point. I've read my fair share of Gettysburg books over the years and appreciate them as much as the next person, but a study of what was going on back in Virginia while the two main armies were on their way north and out of the state almost seems catered to my current tastes. Beginning in mid-June, a sizable Union army commanded by Major General John A. Dix was ordered "to threaten Richmond, by seizing and destroying their railroad bridges over the South and North Anna Rivers, and do them all the damage possible." The first book-length study of this operation, "this volume not only delves into the military operations at the time, but also addresses concurrent issues related to diplomacy, US war policy, and the involvement of enslaved people in the Federal offensive." Newsome's study suggests that Dix's campaign might have been "one of the Union war effort’s more compelling lost opportunities in the East."

Another UPK title that will likely go right to the top of the reading pile after it arrives is Ethan Rafuse's From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January-May 1862 (October 2022). I've been wondering what Rafuse has been up to lately, and this answer to my question is a most exciting one that keenly fits my reading interests. Covering Virginia theater operations on both land and sea, this book "is the only modern scholarly work that looks at the operations that took place in Virginia in early 1862, from the Romney Campaign that opened the year to the naval engagement between the Monitor and Merrimac to the movements and engagements fought by Union and Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley, on the York-James Peninsula, and in northern Virginia, as a single, comprehensive campaign." This is just conjecture/hope on my part, but the "January to July of 1862" reference in the publisher's description and the May conclusion to this book are strongly suggestive of a multi-volume (at least two anyway) treatment being in the offing. The possibility of getting a major Peninsula and Seven Days volume from Rafuse is quite tantalizing.