Earl Hess and a Civil War hiatus well earned

Prolific historian Earl Hess informed me long ago that he was always working on multiple book-length publishing projects at the same time. So it was no big surprise, though still no less remarkable a feat of skill and endurance, that for quite a stretch we were getting 1-2 Civil War titles per year from him. That furious pace had to come to an end at some point. My records indicate that it has been nearly two years since his July 22 Battle of Atlanta and Civil War mine warfare books were published. I wish I could find the old master list of projects he had planned. The only unfulfilled one from it that immediately comes to mind is the Jonesboro battle history.

Hess's "break" from Civil War publishing, which would be unremarkable in length for anyone else, does not mean that he hasn't still been hard at work on other things. While I was combing through all the latest university press catalogs, I discovered that Kansas will be publishing Hess's War Underground: A History of Military Mining in Siege Warfare (Feb 2025) next month. Going back to the February 2023 book about Civil War mine warfare, and now this new one, it appears that Hess has developed a heavy interest in the global evolution and context of military technologies and their uses. Indeed, War Underground "offers a sweeping study of the use of offensive and defensive military mining in more than 300 sieges from around the world and across almost three millennia." There seems little doubt that there will be at least some coverage of the Civil War in there.