1. Historic Imagination's Brad Butkovich created a nice set of battlefield maps and photographs to accompany Visual Antietam, his three-part serial publication [here, here, and here] of the Antietam portions of the Carman manuscript. He's now parlayed his well-honed cartography skills into the creation of a full-on, full-color Antietam atlas. I didn't see a preorder for it, so it missed the site's July "Coming Soon" feature, but The Antietam Battlefield Atlas is available now.
2. You might recall that Christopher Thrasher's Suffering in the Army of Tennessee: A Social History of the Confederate Army of the Heartland from the Battles for Atlanta to the Retreat from Nashville made my 2022 Top 10 list. If I had been aware of its existence at the time I put together my list of most anticipated releases of the second half of 2023, Thrasher's upcoming Miserable Little Conglomeration: A Social History of the Port Hudson Campaign would surely have been given a spot. October is the current release month. It'll be great to have another major Port Hudson study to add to the collection.
3. Series alert: Casemate Illustrated. Most Civil War readers are familiar with Osprey books, new and old, and Casemate recently created a similarly styled page-limited series that "explor(es) key elements of military history, from campaigns, units and battles to aircraft, ships and weapons." ... "With profiles of key personnel, a timeline, and explanatory text boxes, the concise text gives a clear overview of events and highlights the most important information on any given topic." The series has a number of Civil War volumes in the works beginning with Kevin Pawlak's Such a Clash of Arms: The Maryland Campaign, September 1862 (July 2023). That one will be followed next year by:
• The Vicksburg Campaign: Grant’s Failed Offensive by Andrew Miller (Jan 2024).
• The Shiloh Campaign: Battle for the Heartland by Sean Chick (Jan 2024).
• The Atlanta Campaign, 1864: Sherman's Campaign to the Outskirts of Atlanta by David Powell (April 2024).
• The Atlanta Campaign, 1864: Peachtree Creek to the Fall of the City by David Powell (April 2024).
4. It's now been a quarter-century since Noah Andre Trudeau's Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 was first published. A combat history narrative of the campaigns and battles in which black troops played a major part, one that was groundbreaking in its comprehensiveness, Trudeau's study will be re-released by UP of Kansas this summer in a new updated edition that "adds material on additional engagements and other aspects of Black soldiers’ experiences, and features a new selection of photographs."
5. The near future will reveal more examples of previously neglected subjects (most commonly biographies and battle/campaign histories) being suddenly addressed in twos. On the heels of a pair of Wilder bios released almost simultaneously is yet another James Montgomery biography. Todd Mildfelt and David Schafer's Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery (OU Press, Oct '24) follows Robert Conner's James Montgomery: Abolitionist Warrior. We also have two books coming up that cover the life and Civil War activities of a bit more obscure but no less interesting figure, John Y. Beall. Both slated for October, we will be getting William Harris's Confederate Privateer: The Life of John Yates Beall from LSU Press and Ralph Lindeman's Confederates from Canada: John Yates Beall and the Rebel Raids on the Great Lakes from McFarland. Authors must love it when that happens.
Drew, Casemate is the distributor of Savas Beatie titles, and its president and owner is a good friend of mine. We tossed this idea around and I am assisting, more as an agent and advisor, using Savas Beatie authors or contacts for these titles. This prevents some of the potential conflicts that might otherwise come up. -- Ted Savas
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