More on the 1862 war in Virginia through the end of the Seven Days

Posting yesterday's review of Brian Burton's Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 made me wonder yet again whether we'll ever get a treatment of the Peninsula Campaign on the order of Gordon Rhea's Overland series or David Powell's multi-volume Chickamauga and Atlanta projects.

Thematically similar to Burton's single-volume overview, but fleshed out over multiple books, is Ethan's Rafuse's new Virginia campaign of 1862 series published by University Press of Kansas. The first volume, From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January-May 1862, was reviewed positively on the site. Its follow-up, From the Valley to the Tidewater: The War in Virginia, May 21–June 12, 1862, will be out in November. I am looking forward to it. It's still unclear, at least to me, exactly how far Rafuse plans to take this. If he visits here, perhaps he can chime in. There was no series roadmap revealed in the first book. In fact, no future volumes were mentioned at all. Perhaps everything will be explained in From the Valley to the Tidewater. It ends with the launching of Jeb Stuart's first "Ride Around McClellan," so I would imagine that there is at least one Seven Days installment in the works to follow that one.

Though quirky and largely one-sided in its approach, the late Russel Beatie's enormously ambitious Army of the Potomac project is also worth mentioning. Alas, it's author was only able to finish three volumes before he passed away: The Army of the Potomac: Birth of Command, November 1860-September 1861; (Volume 2) McClellan Takes Command, September 1861-February 1862; and (Volume 3) McClellan's First Campaign, March 1862-May 1862. Years ago, Savas Beatie co-founder and current director Ted Savas hinted at the possibility, uncertain as it was, of putting together a fourth volume out of Beatie's unfinished material, but I haven't come across any update on that since then.

Correction

Something brought up in Friday's book review needs to be corrected. On the matter of Jonesboro battle studies that are in the works, I've just heard direct from the most reliable source (Gary Ecelbarger himself) that he is not working on a Jonesboro book either independently or in partnership with anyone else. It's funny how the author rumor mill gets momentum. I don't know how many times I read in recent years about Gary being tied to such a project. One thing that is certain is that he would have done a great job. He did tell me about some other things he was working on, but I will leave that news for him to disseminate in his own good time!

Fall/Winter University Press Catalogs '26

It's that time of year again when the university presses roll out their upcoming seasonal catalogs. Overall numbers aren't terribly high (they would be higher if we include Civil War-adjacent stuff), but I am really liking the range of topics spread out across the board.

LSU:

• How Lincoln Won: The 1860 Presidential Election and the Origins of the Civil War by DeWitt & Schwartz.
• Lee’s Army During the Petersburg Campaign: A Numerical Study by Albert Young.
• Louisiana’s Tigers: The Men of Wheat’s Confederate Battalion by Ross Brooks.
• Managing the Union Army: Scott, McClellan, Halleck, and Grant as General-in-Chief by Earl Hess.

UNC:

• A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw by Kevin Levin.

Nebraska:

• Gettysburg Cavalry Commander: The Rise and Fall of General Alfred Pleasonton by Edward Longacre (Potomac).
• A Prisoner in Dixieland: The Civil War Memoir of Stephen French by Gregory Lawrance, ed. (Potomac).

Oklahoma:

• John M. Schofield: Soldier–Statesman of the Civil War and Gilded Age by Robert Wooster.

TAMU Consortium:

• Texas and the Civil War: New Perspectives by Carl Moneyhon (UNT).
• Texas Cotton and Confederate Finance: Blockade Runners, Border Merchants, and Government Agents by Ellis & McCaslin (UNT).

Tennessee:

• Fighting with Stonewall in the Valley: The Diary of John Henry Stover Funk by Foster & Mortenson, eds.
• Imprisoned at Camp Douglas: The Diary and Art of Knoxville Confederate Samuel Bell Palmer by Michael Van Ness, ed.
• Texas Secedes: A Documentary History by Dwight Pitcaithley.

Georgia:

• From Blood to Ink: How the Press Covered the Gettysburg Campaign by Matthew Larson.
• Hard Women, Hard War: How Southern Women Shaped U.S. Policy During the Civil War by Laura Mammina.

South Carolina:

• Smoke on the Battery: Charleston and the Longest Siege of the Civil War by Stephen Wise.

Kansas:

• Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War by Timothy Smith.
• From the Valley to the Tidewater: The War in Virginia, May 21–June 12, 1862 by Ethan Rafuse.

Southern Illinois:

• Grant and His Generals by Henry Laver.

Book News: Napoleon’s Long Shadow

Without a doubt, the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte was felt in both popular and military circles for a good chunk of the nineteenth century following the French emperor's final defeat and exile. His impact on American officers is mentioned countless times in Civil War biographies and military history books and articles, yet writers only rarely delve into particular examples or analyze the connection at any meaningful depth. Timothy Smith aims to correct that with his next book, Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War.

From the description: "Despite decades of casual analogy, until now, no comprehensive study has ever examined how Napoleon’s campaigns shaped Civil War operations on the battlefield. Through a series of clear, apples-to-apples comparisons, author Tim Smith places nine of Napoleon’ campaigns alongside their closest Civil War counterparts. The result is a fresh interpretation of how the Civil War was fought. Smith argues that the war’s early years were profoundly shaped by earlier models of warfare, while its final year marked a decisive break toward a more modern, industrial style of conflict." Through that interpretation, Smith's book "not only clarifies how Civil War commanders operated, but also challenges long-held assumptions rooted more in legend than in reality."

Sounds very interesting. Look for it in November from University Press of Kansas.

Rafuse's War in Virginia series continues

You might recall that I liked Ethan Rafuse's From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January-May 1862 (Kansas, 2023) quite a bit. I remarked at the time that it had the hallmarks of the beginning of a series (including a cliffhanger ending) but nowhere inside was there even a hint that future volumes were planned. Happily, it turns out to be the case that The War in Virginia is indeed a series-format project, the next volume, From the Valley to the Tidewater: The War in Virginia, May 21–June 12, 1862, scheduled for a November '26 release.

Whereas the first book covered a five-month period that positioned Union forces on the doorstep of Richmond, the second covers three weeks of dramatic Confederate countermoves on both the Shenandoah and capital fronts. It will be interesting to see how far forward Rafuse plans to carry this series. Hopefully, the new book will lay out a roadmap.

Offerings from the Spring '26 catalogs

LSU:
• Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief by Kenneth Noe.
• Death or Victory: The Louisiana Native Guards and the Black Military’s Significance in the Civil War by A.J. Cade.
• A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers by Henry Motty.
• Henry Eustace McCulloch: Texas Ranger, Legislator, Civil War General by David Paul Smith.
• Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era by Timothy Grundmeier.

UNC:
• Out of This Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Equal Rights in the Civil War Era by Warren Milteer.
• A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse by Megan VanGorder.

Kansas:
• Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War by Earl Hess.
• Procuring Victory: The Army Quartermaster and the Economics of Expansion in Nineteenth-Century America by John Wendt.

Kent State:
• Civil War Camps and Soldier Health: Sanitation and Military Effectiveness in the Union Army by Earl Hess.

Nebraska:
• Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 by Brian Burton.
• Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide by Brian Burton.
• Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment (Potomac Books) by Damon Root.

Oklahoma:
• Mollie Brumley's Civil War: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas by Theodore Catton.

Mercer:
Forthcoming.

SIU:
• The Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign: February 6–16, 1862 ed. by Woodworth & Grear.

TAMU Consortium:
• Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA (TSHA Press) by McCaslin & Stewart.

Tennessee:
• Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War by Neff & Fluker.
• Civil War Photo Forensics: Investigating Battlefield Photographs Through a Critical Lens by Scott Hippensteel.

Georgia:
• Deserter Declarations: Letters from North Carolinians Who Abandoned Their Confederate Units ed. by Judkin Browning.
• Mercy in Disaster: Abby Hopper Gibbons’s Journals and Letters from Four Years of Civil War Nursing ed. by Angela Schear.

Savas Beatie:
• Through the Civil War with the Fourteenth Ohio Infantry: Horatio Quiggle’s Memoir of Service edited ed. by Hagopian & Powell.
• Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862 by Timothy Snyder.
• Crisis at Antietam: The Cornfield and West Woods and the Opening Rounds of the Civil War’s Bloodiest Battle, September 17, 1862 by Steven Eden.
• Retreat from Victory: The Battle of Malvern Hill and the End of the Seven Days, July 1, 1862 by Francis O’Reilly.
• This Great Contest Afloat: The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans by Neil Chatelain.
• Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign by Kelly-Fischer & Greenwalt.

Book News: A Summer of Battles

When it comes to the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, David Powell's five-volume series is consuming the bulk of reader attention these days. With only fifteen months passing between the release dates of the first two installments, the project is proceeding at a rapid clip. However, that's not to say that there aren't other things of possible interest out there for us to consider in the meantime.

A couple of days ago, I came across a new two-volume set covering the fighting around and below the city following the July 28 Battle of Ezra Church (itself the subject of two recent full-length battle studies):

• A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Volume 1: The Siege of Atlanta, Utoy Creek and The Grand Movement
and • A Summer of Battles - The Final Weeks of the Civil War's 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Volume 2: Jonesboro, Lovejoy's Station and the Capture of Atlanta

What primarily leads me to have more than a passing interest in these two self-published efforts is their author, David Allison. I rather liked his 2018 book Attacked On All Sides: The Civil War Battle of Decatur, Georgia, the Untold Story of the Battle of Atlanta [to read the site review, go here]. Its primary drawback was a lack of maps, so I hope the author took that criticism to heart when putting together the new set, which is available in very reasonably priced hardcover and paperback versions. 

Francis O'Reilly's Malvern Hill study has a release date

Long suffering students of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign series of battles have had two major projects on their minds for a very long time. The first, R.E.L. Krick's massive two-volume history of the Battle of Gaines' Mill, has already been released to universal acclaim. An American Battlefield Trust donation exclusive, it's still unclear if there are plans for a general release in the future (at least I've yet to come across anything said about it publicly). A study as unique and important as that one deserves a wider release, so hopefully that will happen someday.

Getting to the matter at hand, though, the other much-anticipated title of the pair, Frank O'Reilly's Malvern Hill battle history, has just received a release window from the publisher. If you follow Savas Beatie on social media, you already know that Retreat from Victory: The Battle of Malvern Hill and the End of the Seven Days, July 1, 1862 is scheduled for a Spring '26 release. Online retailers currently have the date as May 15, but, as such things go, that may change.

It won't have the girth of the Krick set, but it will come in at a tome-like 500+ pages. The Sneden watercolor was a great choice for the cover art, too.

Book News in the Halloween Spirit: Haunted by Memory

When scholars discuss the haunting legacy of the Civil War they very rarely, if ever, are referring to anything supernatural in nature. That will change with editors Amy Laurel Fluker and John Neff's Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War (Univ of Tenn Press), which bills itself as "the first scholarly analysis of the significance of ghosts to the history and memory of the Civil War." We won't get it in time for this upcoming Halloween, but having it in our hands for next year's spooky season seems possible.

Haunted by Memory is an "annotated anthology of Civil War ghost stories" that "includes hundreds of examples of ghostly tales that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books between 1861 and 1932." "These tales both satisfied and fed popular demand for news, entertainment, and ghostlore, and became powerful tools of cultural memory."

Fluker and Neff's efforts blend disciplines under the larger umbrella of cultural history. "By bridging the study of the Civil War, folklore, and memory, this collection expands the parameters of cultural history and reveals how the supernatural became a lasting part of the commemorative landscape of the American Civil War."

Book News: Desert Empire

I was doing some online browsing of titles with tentative release dates for next year and discovered a new slate of Emerging Civil War offerings. I like the ECW series for what it is and what it aims to do, but for a while I did have a bone to pick with its narrow geographical focus on the East. Happily (for me anyway), the always growing writing crew there has added a significant amount of western flavor in recent times. Though they still haven't ventured off into the depths of my beloved trans-Mississippi West, that gap will be initially addressed with the release of Patrick Kelly-Fischer and Phillip S. Greenwalt's Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign.

The 1862 New Mexico Campaign is relatively rare among T-M military campaigns in that it has been the rich subject of both numerous single-volume overviews and highly detailed battle studies (Donald Frazier and later authors have also delved deeply into the "empire" angle), but I will still be very interested to read what Kelly-Fischer and Greenwalt's interpretation has to offer. The modest scale of the vast majority of operations conducted west of the Mississippi River arguably make them a perfect fit for exploration within the confines of the ECW series, so here's to wishing that Desert Empire sells well enough to encourage expanded T-M coverage.

Book News: Civil War Camps and Soldier Health

Military Historian Earl Hess's astonishingly prolific capacity for authoring detailed scholarly works on a wide range of topics without sacrificing depth of research and overall quality seems neverending. Before I'd even finished reading and reviewing his current book (Civil War Cavalry), news of his next publishing project, Shattered Courage (Kansas, March '26), already arrived. But that's not all that's on the immediate horizon.

In May of 2026, Kent State University Press will publish Hess's Civil War Camps and Soldier Health: Sanitation and Military Effectiveness in the Union Army. CWBA's tracking of publishing trends over the past two and a half decades has revealed a plethora of modern works exploring Civil War medicine and what factors affected the health and well-being of Civil War soldiers in camp and in the field. There is little doubt that Hess's upcoming study will produce some interesting, important, and perhaps contrarian contributions to that literature. Content details are absent at this early date, but, just going from the title alone, I'm particularly looking forward to reading Hess's assessment of the interplay between sanitation measures and Union Army effectiveness. While the focus is on the boys in blue, presumably the book will raise at least some targeted points of comparison between the two sides.

Book News: "They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory"

When it comes to titles covering Civil War in Indian Territory topics, it is rare enough to get one fresh release in any given month, but getting two puts us in a Halley's Comet realm of frequency. We've already mentioned William Lees's Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield on the site, but another intriguing September '25 study just turned up in Michael J. Manning's They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory.

A pair of survey histories of the Civil War in Indian Territory have been published fairly recently, Mary Jane Warde's When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (2013) and Clint Crowe's Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (2019), but neither of those fine books goes into much depth in their coverages of the various campaigns and battles fought within the borders of today's Oklahoma. It's too bad we can't get a good sample of the main text, but a look at Manning's table of contents (which can be found by clicking the "Read sample" box at the page linked above in bold) looks promising.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of what we do get with Civil War in Indian Territory book publishing has been, to put it kindly, amateurish in nature, but there are good reasons to place our trust in Manning. He spent over three decades with the National Park Service, retiring as chief ranger at Fort Donelson NB. Sharp readers might also recall that he's the author of the Blue & Gray magazine two-part series featuring the Civil War years in Indian Territory. Indeed, portions of this book were previously published in those 2011 and 2015 issues. The main narrative of this book is over 550 8.5"x11" pages, so it's pretty clear that this is not a rehash of the B&G material but something much more detailed in nature.

Book News: Shattered Courage

How Civil War soldiers reacted to battlefield combat has always been a part of prolific military historian Earl Hess's wide range of scholarly interests. His 1997 study The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat heavily influenced our modern understanding of the ways in which Civil War soldiers experienced fighting and learned to cope with its many physical and psychological horrors and trials.

Next year's Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War (UP of Kansas, March 2026) marks a return to that area of study with a major examination of "those men who tried but failed to meet the test of battle in the Civil War." Soldier behaviors and reactions ranging from courage and cowardice to complete surrender have received noteworthy attention in a number of recent works, among them those from Lesley Gordon, David Silkenat, and the late Peter Carmichael, but Hess's upcoming volume aims to provide "the first comprehensive account of soldiers who refused to fight in the midst of combat."

Employing groundbreaking statistical analysis and "decades of research," Hess "charts the limits on combat morale" and is "the first historian to identify combat defaulters from personal accounts and official reports and to then examine their service records to discover what happened to them in the military system." The author's work also traces how both comrades and the army system in general reacted to and dealt with the phenomenon. I have to admit that I've never come across the term "combat defaulter" before (perhaps Hess coined it himself). Such men are described as being "(f)ar from heroes but not deserters," with most willing to try again the test of combat.

Book News: Civil War Photo Forensics

Scott Hippensteel is one of those rare authors whose Civil War topical interests are both are all over the place and all appealing to me. Their novelty in approach and content is an added benefit. With previous books studying rock geology's effects on Civil War combat [link to review], the ways in which geological sediments (particularly sand) shaped Civil War campaigns and battles [link], and myths of the Civil War [link], Hippensteel has now directed his attention toward Civil War photography.

Civil War Photo Forensics: Investigating Battlefield Photographs Through a Critical Lens is currently scheduled for a Spring '26 release from University of Tennessee Press. In it, Hippensteel "examines various Civil War photographs and photographers, employing metrics to determine which photographs have become the most iconic and which photographs are authentic." In addition to engaging with the journalism versus art debate when it comes to Civil War field photography, the book launches "multiple investigations into a few controversial photographs, applying a critical analysis to both the photographs and the photographic process at that time, and an argument for the legacies of Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and others who placed themselves on the battlefield alongside soldiers and officers on both sides." Like they do everything else, Antietam and Gettysburg dominate previous forensic discussions of Civil War battlefield photography, and I hope that Hippensteel will sample images from other campaigns and theaters.

Joe Johnston, "Preeminent Strategist"?

For a long time, many military history students of the Civil War bought into the notion that Joseph E. Johnston was a master of Fabian-style strategy and operations who offered a winning alternative to the kind of aggressive, high-intensity (and high casualty) style of warfare favored by other generals such as Robert E. Lee and that the Confederacy could ill afford. Over the past several decades, though, I've gotten the impression that fewer and fewer people retain such faith in Johnston's abilities and his capacity for greatness. One of those who quite clearly does is F. Gregory Toretta. The author of one of two recent studies claiming that James Longstreet possessed visionary strategic and tactical acumen, Toretta's Preeminent Strategist: General Joseph Eggleston Johnston, The Confederacy’s Most Agile General (Casemate, NOV '25) takes on the case of another major Confederate high command figure that the author believes misunderstood and underappreciated. When it comes to providing a convincing argument in support of the grand claims outlined in the description, the author has a steep climb ahead of him (at least in my opinion), but I am always open to different approaches to disputed topics.

Civil War-related titles from the Fall-Winter '25 catalogs

UNC:
• Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War by Amanda Laury Kleintop.
• Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America's First Opioid Crisis by Jonathan Jones.
• Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848–1867 by Erika Pani.
• The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War By Lindsay Rae Smith Privette.
• Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War by Aaron Sheehan-Dean.
• A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era By Sarah Jones Weicksel.

LSU:
• Civil War Cavalry: Waging Mounted Warfare in Nineteenth-Century America by Earl Hess.
• The Devil’s Own Purgatory: The United States Mississippi River Squadron in the Civil War by Robert Gudmestad.
• War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers by Joshua Shiver.

Tennessee:
• The Greatest Calamity: Tennessee in the Civil War Era by John Fowler.
• Decisions on Western Waters: The Twenty-Seven Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations by Michael Becker.
• Missouri and the Secession Crisis: A Documentary History by Dwight Pitcaithley.

South Carolina:
• Soldier of the South: Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson at War and Peace by Edward Hagerty.
• Winning Our Wonder: Rhetorical Re/Constructions of American Civil War Women on the Web by Patty Wilde.

Kansas:
• Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital by Larry Daniel.

Nebraska:
• If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Cause in the Civil War by Tyler Alexander (Potomac).

TAMU Consortium:
• Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield by William Lees (TAMU).

Georgia:
• Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy by Beau Cleland.

Another dormant series revived: Great Campaigns of the Civil War

Last month, I posted [here] some news regarding the impending return of the This Hallowed Ground and Civil War Campaigns in the West series from University of Nebraska Press and SIU Press, respectively. Now there's even more good news. Ten years after the publication of Perry Jamieson's Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War (2015) comes word that the long-awaited next installment of the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series will be released in July of 2026. I've long known that an 1862 Peninsula Campaign addition to the series was in the works and was pleased to learn that it will finally be coming to fruition next year. Like the new This Hallowed Ground guidebook title from the same publisher, Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 is authored by Brian Burton. I don't know anything more about it than what's found at the link provided, but having Burton, best known for his Seven Days work, behind it is a plus in my book.

Two of my favorite university press book series to awaken from their slumber next year

1. Among our choices of battlefield touring books, Nebraska's This Hallowed Ground: Guides to Civil War Battlefields series has always been a CWBA favorite. According to the home page, there was an six-year gap between the two most recent volumes, and, more significantly, nothing has been released since 2014. That extended hibernation has long had me concerned that the series was discontinued. Happily, I just found out that that will not be the case, and we'll get another installment next June—Brian Burton's Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide (2026). It will be Burton's second contribution to the series, the first being 2007's The Peninsula and Seven Days: A Battlefield Guide.

2. Also next June we'll get The Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign: February 6-16, 1862 (2026), edited by Woodworth and Grear, from SIU Press's Civil War Campaigns in the West essay anthology series. The most recent title was 2020's Vicksburg Besieged, so in this case the gap between then and now is more like getting back up from a long nap than a deep slumber. At any rate, it's great to get confirmation that the editorial team is still plugging away at their ambitious schedule (by my count, this upcoming title will be the eighth of seventeen originally planned volumes). Unless they can start to shrink that interval between releases again, though, only a modern Methuselah will be able to collect them all.

Upcoming Honey Springs battle study

Advance notice of anthropologist/archaeologist William Lees's Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield (Sept '25) recently popped up. Needless to say, my interest was immediately piqued.

Readers who have been following this site over its nearly two decades of existence know what types of subject matter grab me most, and this one checks a lot of boxes for me. First off, the long-awaited return of Texas A&M University Press to a Civil War topic is worthy of celebration. Check. An original contribution to Trans-Mississippi theater military history (which has been languishing in recent years). Check. First book-length study of one of the most significant battles fought in Indian Territory. Check. Battlefield archaeology being a central component of the study. Check. All nice. I can hardly wait to get my hands on a copy of it.

Savas Beatie to publish Francis O'Reilly's Malvern Hill book in 2026

I just received a press release from Savas Beatie announcing that the publisher has struck a deal with Frank O'Reilly to publish his looooooong anticipated Malvern Hill study, which will be titled Retreat from Victory: The Battle of Malvern Hill and the End of the Seven Days, July 1, 1862.

From the release:

"O'Reilly’s forthcoming and long-awaited book on the Battle of Malvern Hill promises to be a milestone in historical literature, blending deep and original research with outstanding prose and cutting-edge analysis.

O'Reilly, a longtime historian on the Fredericksburg-area battlefields known for delivering outstanding battlefield tours and presentations, garnered critical acclaim and multiple awards for his book The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock (2003). He brings the same detailed and insightful analysis to Retreat from Victory—the first book-length study on this critical combat that had important ramifications for the course of the Civil War and many of its prominent leaders."

This is certainly exciting news for anyone interested in the eastern theater's early-war period and the Peninsula Campaign/Seven Days in particular. As regular visitors to this site know, the project has ranked high on CWBA's list of most highly anticipated titles for a very long time.

Of course, the next question is 'when will we see it?' The answer to that is: "Retreat from Victory is slated for release in May 2026 and will be available in hardcover, digital, and audiobook formats."