Booknotes: Theater of a Separate War, Revised Edition

New Arrival:
• Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 - Revised Edition by Thomas W. Cutrer (UNC Press, 2023).

When Thomas Cutrer's Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 was released in hardcover back in 2017, many Civil War students rejoiced in finally having at their fingertips an up-to-date, single-volume synthesis history of the entire war fought in the Trans-Mississippi theater of operations. Unfortunately, serious issues surrounding content accuracy and presentation made it into the final version of the manuscript (for a few of my thoughts on the matter, go here). Given that the volume was picked up by a number of book clubs and received largely positive reviews and online ratings, it would have been easy for UNCP to sweep its shortcomings under the rug. To the publisher's credit, though, they've decided to reissue the book in a newly revised paperback edition.

From the description: "Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the Trans-Mississippi Theater was site of major clashes from the war's earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater's distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle."

The book has a solid narrative backbone, and I plan on revisiting the text to see how much it's been cleaned up. I recognize that expectations have to be reasonable. Fixing typos, misspelled names, and repeated passages is one thing, but it's another matter altogether to assign a person or persons the prodigious task of combing the manuscript for factual matters needing alteration. To the hoped for degree, the latter is probably unrealistic to expect at this stage of the game, and a spot check of some of my earlier content complaints confirms that those passages have been carried over unchanged into the new edition.

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[UPDATE 7/11/23: Well, I made it to the 175-page mark and unfortunately need to definitively call it a day and redirect my finite reading time more productively. It turns out that already tempered expectations going into the re-read have been fully realized. I appreciate the resources that UNCP invested into cleaning up most of the surface-level flaws of the first edition manuscript (i.e. the aforementioned typographical errors, misspelled names, redundant passages, and the like); however, going by my own list I see no indication that factual errors, large or small, were addressed. I've already sunk a lot of time into reading most of the first edition (and now a third of the new version), and there's not much point in retracing my steps any further. It's too bad because the level of topical comprehensiveness is laudable, and the big picture narrative is pretty solid. Unfortunately, if you are coming at it from a strong background, the continuous flow of errors that emerge from the book's campaign and battle accounts makes for a demoralizing reading experience.]