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.

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.

2025 Spring/Summer university press catalog offerings

(Updated on 2/20/25): Following up on my earlier comments, I perused the recently released Spring/Summer '25 university press catalogs to see if things are on the upswing since the nadir of sorts that was last fall.

As expected, the top-tier giants (in terms of matching quantity with quality) do not disappoint.

LSU:
• Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War ed. by Schieffler & Stith.
• Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South by Jennifer Gross.
• The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family ed. by Henry McKiven.
• Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 by Damien Shiels.
• Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg by Alexandre Caillot.

UNC:
• The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment by James Marten.
• The Second Manassas Campaign ed. by Janney & Shively.
• A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg - Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill by A. Wilson Greene.
• Exceptionalism in Crisis: Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the US Imagination during the Civil War Era by Alys Beverton.

Seven former regulars still come up empty. Among most of those, that trend has gone on for so many years that I despair of ever hearing from them again. You never know, though.

For the rest, in the onesies category we have:

Georgia:
• Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War by Fialka & Carman. With this and an earlier one from UNC, I wonder if publishing "graphic history" will become an emerging trend among some UPs.

Kansas:
• Lincoln's Last Card: The Emancipation Proclamation as a Case of Command by Richard Ellis.

Kent State:
• More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee by Jonathan Engel. As mentioned before, this one is already out.

Mercer:
• Joshua Hill of Madison: Civil War Unionist and Georgia's First Republican Senator, 1812-1891 by Bradley Rice.

Nebraska:
• Waging War for Freedom with the 54th Massachusetts: The Civil War Memoir of John W. M. Appleton edited by Jewell & Van Sickle (Potomac Books).

Oklahoma:
• It looks like it's been five years since the last CW title from OU Press's Campaigns and Commanders series (which has a lot of great entries), so the announcement of Hero of Fort Sumter: The Extraordinary Life of Robert Anderson by Wesley Moody is exciting. I'm looking forward to learning more about Anderson's life and military career.

TAMU Consortium:
• Still nothing from A&M itself, but consortium member State House Press is putting out the following: Rockets, Tanks and Submarines by Edward Cotham.

Tennessee:
• Decisions at Chancellorsville: The Sixteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battle by Sarah Bierle.
• From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees and the Last Years of the American Civil War by Patrick Garrow.

Overall, I would say that the output numbers situation from 2024 going into 2025 remains pretty much the same. Alabama hasn't released its spring catalog yet, but I've scanned through the preorders listed on the two biggest online book retailers. The Tide have only published one ACW title in recent memory so I'm not too sanguine about something popping up later.

Fall/Winter 2024 catalogs - Civil War titles where have ye gone?

I don't have any numbers to back this up, just twenty years of close observation, but it's become pretty clear that the total number of Civil War titles published each year is currently in an extended period of contraction. As an outside observer I can only speculate as to the factors involved and have no access to raw sales data, but at least when it comes to the kinds of books typically addressed on CWBA the downward trend started trickling in that direction somewhere around the mid-point of the Sesquicentennial, with the fade becoming much more pronounced in recent years. On the reader side of things I only have my own site to go from, but there's been no corresponding drop in visitation. 2020 was the site's best year in terms of total visitor numbers (though the pandemic trapping people at home in front of their computers surely played some role in that spike), but the subsequent others haven't been far off.

Thankfully, a core of independent publishers such as Savas Beatie, McFarland, and The History Press are still chugging along pretty nicely, but it's been an increasingly dry well for some time now when it comes to Civil War books put out by museums, research libraries, small local publishers, and historical societies. Perhaps the most startling trend in all this involves the university presses, traditionally one of the bedrocks of Civil War publishing and major source of review submissions to this site.

Indeed, what prompted me to make this post was my survey of the Fall/Winter catalogs of those UPs that for much of this new century typically produced 2 or more Civil War titles per spring and fall publishing season. From a list of fifteen of these old guard UPs, eleven had no 1861-65 titles in their respective Fall '24 catalogs, only two had two titles with considerable CW content, and one had a single offering. Sure, the thinness of this current season is a bit out of the ordinary, but the absence of CW titles has been part of a noticeable trend. A large proportion of those fifteen have ceased regular publication of CW books, and a significant number haven't produced a CW title of any kind in years. If this continues, we'll just have to get used to a new normal of high quality yet much more infrequent releases.

The UP numbers outlook isn't all gloomy, though. Quality of individual releases remains high. That Tennessee has become a positive outlier in actually expanding its number and range of yearly Civil War offerings is a welcome development. Always reliable LSU Press continues to be one of the kings by publishing five titles during this current cycle:

• Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory (Sept)
• Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games (Sept)
• The Mexican-American War Experiences of Twelve Civil War Generals (Oct)
• Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North (Nov)
• The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 (Nov)

LSU's traditional partner in crime, UNC Press, took a bit of a breather this fall, but they come back strong next spring with a big line-up:

• The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment
• The Second Manassas Campaign
• A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg - Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill
• Exceptionalism in Crisis: Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the US Imagination during the Civil War Era

Further on the UNC front, I haven't come across any solid indication online yet that Robertson's Chickamauga Campaign V2, as hoped for here, has been placed on the publisher's Spring '25 schedule. We'll have to await official release of their S/S catalog to find out for sure.

Dram Tree Books resurrected

I recently noticed online that some old Dram Tree titles are back in print. You might recall that the press published all manner of North Carolina history titles, including some fine Civil War books, before shutting its doors in 2010. Just off the top of my head, two Civil War volumes from Dram Tree that I still heartily recommend are Davis Norris's Potter's Raid: The Union Cavalry's Boldest Expedition in Eastern North Carolina (2008) and James Walker's Rebel Gibraltar: Fort Fisher and Wilmington, C.S.A. (2005).

Getting back to the reason for this post, I found a Wilmington Star News article [click here] from last summer announcing the revival of the press under a new partnership between original owner Jack Fryer and historian Chris Fonvielle. Hopefully, we'll see some more original Civil War histories from them. According to the article, planned releases so far include "a guide to North Carolina plantations, a guide to North Carolina historic sites, and a number of books for student readers on such topics as the 19th century Life Saving Service on the Tar Heel coast and on the 1861 battle of Fort Sumter."

It's nice to see a niche press with a proven record come back. Check out their new home page here.

The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Civil War Series

The U.S. Army Center of Military History recently published a series of brochures (books, really) covering the Civil War period, sixteen volumes beginning with a history of the antebellum army and concluding with the end of Reconstruction. The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Civil War Series titles are sold in hard copy on various online sites but they are government publications so you can also download them for free in PDF format at the bold link above.

CWN about face

It seems that a grassroots campaign has succeeded in convincing the new owner of Civil War News to abandon earlier transition plans and keep the publication as is. CWN in its current form must mean a lot to many people. Here's the announcement on Facebook [link].

I was kind of interested in seeing what the new magazine would look like. At the local B&N rack I counted 21 modeling magazines (the glue and plastic kind, not the skinny runway kind) and one would think there might be room for yet another CW periodical. Tough business, though.

More FW catalogs (Part 3)

Oklahoma:

• Californio Lancers: The 1st Battalion of Native Cavalry in the Far West, 1863–1866 by Tom Prezelski.

This is the first full history of the unit, which was composed "largely of Californio Hispanic volunteers from the “Cow Counties” of Southern California and the Central Coast." An important regional policeman, the 1st Battalion "pursued bandits, fought an Indian insurrection in northern California, garrisoned Confederate-leaning southern California, patrolled desert trails, guarded the border, and attempted to control the Chiricahua Apaches in southern Arizona."

Texas A&M:

• Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War by Mark K. Ragan.

Ragan's book traces the two year history of the Singer Secret Service Corps, the brainchild of Texas businessman and inventor Edgar Collins Singer. Backed by the Confederate government, the Corps developed submarines, contact mines, and other devices for the war effort.

• The Archaeology of Engagement: Conflict and Revolution in the United States edited by Dana Lee Pertermann & Holly Kathryn Norton and Echoes of Glory: Historical Military Sites Across Texas by Thomas E. Alexander and Dan K. Utley.

Going from the descriptions only, Civil War content is unknown for both but I thought I'd mention them anyway.

North Texas:

• Against the Grain: Colonel Henry M. Lazelle and the U.S. Army by James Carson.

Lazelle seems to have had a chequered career. Captured in Texas at the outbreak of the Civil War and held by the Confederates for over a year, he was paroled and in late 1863 led the 16th New York Cavalry for twelve months before resigning to serve in other capacities. "In charge of the official records of the Civil War in Washington, he was accused of falsifying records, exonerated, but dismissed short of tour. As Commandant of Cadets at West Point, he was a key figure during the infamous court martial of Johnson Whittaker, one of West Point’s first African American cadets. Again, he was relieved of duty after a bureaucratic battle with the Academy’s Superintendent."

Alabama:

• Civil War Alabama by Christopher Lyle McIlwain, Sr.

"Providing a fresh and insightful synthesis of military events, economic factors such as inflation and shortages, politics and elections, the pivotal role of the legal profession, and the influence of the press, McIlwain’s Civil War Alabama illuminates the fissiparous state of white, antebellum Alabamians divided by class, geography, financial interests, and political loyalties." Wow, 'fissiparous'. I'll have to use that someday.

Southern Illinois:

• Villainous Compounds: Chemical Weapons and the American Civil War by Guy R. Hasegawa.

Hasegawa "describes the potential weapons, the people behind the concepts, and the evolution of some chemical weapon concepts into armaments employed in future wars."

• The Tennessee Campaign of 1864 ed. by Steven E. Woodworth & Charles D Grear.

The next volume in SIUP's fine Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland series, the book's essays "explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, ... . An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville." The Cleburne diary discovery and publication is a interesting development mentioned here before (see comments).

• Lincoln, the Law, and Presidential Leadership ed. by Charles M. Hubbard.

The essays collected in the volume look at "civil liberties during wartime; presidential pardons; the loyalty (or treason) of government employees; Lincoln’s political ideology and its influence on his approach to citizenship; Lincoln’s defense of the Constitution, the Union, and popular government; constitutional restraints on Lincoln as he dealt with slavery and emancipation; and how Lincoln’s image has been used in presidential rhetoric."

• Lincoln and the Immigrant by Jason H. Silverman.

Silverman "investigates Lincoln’s evolving personal, professional, and political relationship with the wide variety of immigrant groups he encountered throughout his life, revealing that Lincoln related to the immigrant in a manner few of his contemporaries would or could emulate." The book also discusses Lincoln's cultivation of immigrant support for the war and their own influences on his policy making.

FW catalogs (Part 2)

Arkansas:

• Slavery and Secession in Arkansas: A Documentary History edited by James J. Gigantino.

Gigantino's selections are "(d)rawn from contemporary pamphlets, broadsides, legislative debates, public addresses, newspapers, and private correspondence" and document the period between the the early months of 1859 and summer 1861.

Tennessee:

• Historical Archaeology of Arkansas: A Hidden Diversity edited by Carl G. Drexler.

There's Civil War site coverage among the nine essays in the book, thus it's inclusion in the list.

• Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer by Christopher K. Coleman.

There's no shortage of writing connecting Bierce's writing to his war service but this new book seems to offer the deepest look yet at Bierce and the 9th Indiana through their movements and battles.

Fordham:

• Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz

Kurtz examines how American Catholics used war service as a means to counter nativism, religious discrimination, and questioned patriotism.

Georgia:

• Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri by Sharon Romeo.

The book examines the use of the U.S. military justice system by black Missouri women "to lodge complaints against employers and former masters, (seek) legal recognition of their marriages, and (claim) pensions as the widows of war veterans." Through the military legal system, these women staked claims to "citizenship rights well before they would be guaranteed through the establishment of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Kansas:

• A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary At the Confederate States Capital Volume 1: April 1861–July 1863 and Volume 2: August 1863–April 1865 by J. B. Jones, edited by James I. Robertson, Jr.

In this new edition of the famous Jones diaries, Robertson "provides introductions to each volume, over 2,700 endnotes that identify, clarify, and expand on Jones’s material, and a first ever index which makes Jones’s unique insights and observations accessible to interested readers."

FW catalogs

As usual, with the approach of summer the first of the Fall-Winter catalogs dribble out. Some of these titles have been mentioned before on the site.

Kent State:
• One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching toward the Civil War by Michael F. Conlin.
• Border Wars: The Civil War in Tennessee and Kentucky edited by Kent T. Dollar, Larry H. Whiteaker, and W. Calvin Dickinson.
• “My Greatest Quarrel with Fortune” : Major General Lew Wallace in the West, 1861–1862 by Charles G. Beemer.
• Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry edited by Eric R. Faust.
• Citizens and Communities: Civil War History Readers, Volume 4 edited by J. Matthew Gallman.

KSUP puts out a yearly rather than seasonal catalog and most of their 2015 Civil War catalog is winter month weighted. Border Wars is a companion to the excellent Sister States, Enemy States edited by the same crew but different publisher. Gail Stephens's Shadow of Shiloh offered a very fine history of Wallace's entire military career but Beemer focuses specifically on the general's early service in the western theater.

Nebraska & Potomac:
• The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory edited by Bradley R. Clampitt.

This set of essays examines both military and home fronts, with some attention paid to the even more neglected western part of the territory.

Kentucky:
• Lincoln’s Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President by Kathryn Canavan.

There's already plenty out there but I was expecting a bigger flood of assassination books this year.

LSU:
• Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable.
• Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War by Andrew S. Bledsoe.

Each side demonized the other with abandon but Rable's contribution to Civil War cultural studies closely focuses on anti-Union rhetoric in speech and on the written page. Bledsoe analyzes "wartime writings, post-war reminiscences, company and regimental papers, census records, and demographic data" in order to construct the most comprehensive study yet of the Civil War company officer.

North Carolina:
• The World the Civil War Made edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur.
• Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Caroline E. Janney.
• Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era by Tiya Miles.

Downs and Masur's book is"(a)n interregional, national history that challenges traditional
boundaries of post-Civil War history" and Gallagher and Janney revive the Military Campaigns of the Civil War series after an extended dormancy. I despise the viral spread of television ghost hunter shows not because they're a part of a "troubling" popular phenomenon but because they're insultingly stupid. Miles takes issue with Old South "ghost tours" for not being up on the latest scholarship.

S-B's North Carolina spring

Students of the late war period inside North Carolina cannot help but be pleased with the Spring '15 lineup that Savas Beatie has scheduled, from battle history "To Prepare for Sherman's Coming": The Battle of Wise's Forks, March 1865 to atlas The North Carolina Civil War Atlas: The Old North State at War to edited journal Resisting Sherman: A Confederate Surgeon's Journal and the Civil War in the Carolinas, 1865 to biography Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade to accessible overviews Calamity in Carolina: The Battles of Averasboro and Bentonville, March 1865 and To the Bitter End: Appomattox, Bennett Place, and the Surrenders of the Confederacy. Now we all know there isn't a chance in hell that these books get a collective release anywhere near the tightly bunched dates given but the important thing is they will all see the light of day sometime.

The atlas and Wise's Forks volumes interest me the most. Mark Moore is a special cartographer and Mark Smith and Wade Sokolosky's followup to their sterling No Such Army... has been on my radar for years.

Camp Pope Publishing news

It's been a long long while since the last Camp Pope newsletter but it's always great to get one because it means that a new Trans-Mississippi related release or two is in the immediate future. This new notice did not disappoint.

For December:

THE MARCH TO THE RIVER: FROM THE BATTLE OF PEA RIDGE TO HELENA, SPRING 1862. By Robert G. Schultz. 454 pages, 6 x 9 paperback, illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.95. (Should be available before Christmas)

This is the first detailed study of the campaign of Samuel R. Curtis’s Army of the Southwest following its important victory at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas (March 7-8, 1862). After the withdrawal of Earl Van Dorn’s Confederate army from northwest Arkansas, General Curtis’s next obvious move was to capture Little Rock, the state capital. Poor roads, raging rivers, tenuous supply lines, and harassing Rebel partisans made for a meandering march back up into Missouri, then down into Arkansas along the White River. For the first time a Union army had to depend largely on foraging off the enemy’s resources for its sustenance—a feat repeated more famously two years later in General William T. Sherman’s “March to the Sea.” Bob Schultz has thoroughly researched his book in private archives, period newspaper accounts, published and unpublished soldiers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs, and the Army and Navy Official Records. Published for the first time are maps drawn by Lyman G, Bennett of the 36th Illinois Infantry.

Coming Soon:

CONFEDERATE "TALES OF THE WAR" IN THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI, Part Four: Spring 1864: From Winter Camp to Pleasant Hill and Jenkins’ Ferry. Edited by Michael Banasik. 245 pages, 6 x 9 paperback, illustrations, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. $17.95.(Maybe late 2014, but January 2015 for sure.)

In 1885, the St. Louis Missouri Republican began a Saturday series of articles on the Civil War by the participants, from the lowliest private to the most exalted general. The series ran for two years, comprising in all 94 articles, which dealt with all theaters of the war, including the high seas, from both the Northern and Southern perspectives. Being the home of most readers of the Republican, Missouri figures prominently in the series. Due to the number of pieces on Missouri and the Trans-Mississippi, editor Michael Banasik has grouped them by year. Part Four of CONFEDERATE "TALES OF THE WAR" contains only those articles dealing with events of 1864, specifically Pleasant Hill, the Camden Expedition, and Jenkins’ Ferry, from the Confederate perspective. Appendices include detailed orders of battle for Pleasant Hill and the Camden Expedition, plus biographies of significant individuals. Subsequent volumes in the series will include articles covering the rest of the war, also those from the Northern point of view.

From the Spring University Press catalogs

LSU:
* Civil War Infantry Tactics :Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness by Earl Hess.
* The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March by Lisa T. Frank.
* The Papers of Jefferson Davis Volume 14, 1880–1889 edited by Lynda Lasswell Crist and asst. ed. Suzanne Scott Gibbs.
* Patrick Henry Jones: Irish American, Civil War General, and Gilded Age Politician by Mark Dunkelman.
* The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston.

Kent St (catalog covers entire year so some are late 2015):
* One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching
toward the Civil War by Michael F. Conlin.
* Border Wars: The Civil War in Tennessee and Kentucky edited by Kent T. Dollar, Larry H. Whiteaker and W. Calvin Dickinson (companion to Sister States, Enemy States).
* “My Greatest Quarrel with Fortune”: Major General Lew Wallace in the West, 1861–1862 by Charles G. Beemer (lots of Wallace defenders out there).
* African Canadians in Union Blue: Volunteering for the Cause in the Civil War by Richard M. Reid
* Conspicuous Gallantry: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of James W. King, 11th Michigan Volunteer Infantry edited by Eric R. Faust.
* Citizens and Communities: Civil War History Readers, Volume 4 edited by J. Matthew Gallman.

Kentucky:
* For Brotherhood and Duty: The Civil War History of the West Point Class of 1862 by Brian R. McEnany.
* The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth edited by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert.
* For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War by Patrick A. Lewis.

Nebraska:
* Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War by Perry D. Jamieson.
* The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War by Todd W. Wahlstrom.
* Civil War Washington: History, Place, and Digital Scholarship edited by Susan C. Lawrence.

North Carolina:
* Lincoln’s Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton by William Marvel.
* The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta by Earl J. Hess.
* Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina by Thomas J. Brown (we need more puns in our titles).
* Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman.
* An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era by Adam Wesley Dean.
* Agriculture and the Confederacy: Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South by R. Douglas Hurt.
* Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle.

That's quite a catalog season of reading from only five publishers.

Fall/Winter (mostly fall) UP releases

Florida:
Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War by William B. Lees and Frederick P. Gaske.

Georgia:
Confederate Odyssey: The George W. Wray Jr. Civil War Collection at the Atlanta History Center by Gordon L. Jones.
The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War edited by Brian Allen Drake.

Kent State:
Work for Giants: The Campaign and Battle of Tupelo/Harrisburg, Mississippi, June–July 1864 by Thomas E. Parson.

Kentucky:
Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase by Berry Craig.

Mississippi:
The Mississippi Secession Convention: Delegates and Deliberations in Politics and War, 1861-1865 by Timothy B. Smith.
The Port Royal Experiment: A Case Study in Development by Kevin Dougherty.

North Carolina:
Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory by Anne Sarah Rubin.
The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction by Mark W. Summers.
Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our: Understanding of the Civil War by Stephen Cushman.
A Gunner in Lee’s Army: The Civil War Letters of Thomas Henry Carter edited by Grahan T. Dozier.

Ohio:
Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland by Stephen E. Towne.

Oklahoma:
Soldiers in the Army of Freedom: The 1st Kansas Colored, the Civil War's First African American Combat Unit by Ian M. Spurgeon.
The Early Morning of War: Bull Run, 1861 by Edward G. Longacre.

Southern Illinois:
Lincoln and the Military by John F. Marszalek.
Lincoln and the War's End by John Waugh.
Lincoln's Assassination by Edward Steers.

New Perspectives on the Civil War series (Georgia)

University of Georgia Press just announced a new book series New Perspectives on the Civil War with historian Judkin Browning as general editor. Differentiating itself a bit from the UT Press's venerable and military focused Voices of the Civil War, it's "dedicated to the publication of primary sources of the Civil War era from a wide diversity of perspectives—respecting the soldier’s voice, but not privileging it over every other voice". Uniquely, all the titles will also have a digital component of some kind designed for classroom use.

More spring book news

From the university presses. A few still don't have catalogs available.

South Carolina:

* Notes From a Colored Girl: The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis edited by Karsonya Wise Whitehead.
* The Civil War as Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War edited by David T. Gleeson and Simon Lewis.

Missouri:

* The Collapse of Price’s Raid: The Beginning of the End in Civil War Missouri by Mark Lause.

Arkansas:

* I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over: First-Person Accounts of Civil War Arkansas from the Arkansas Historical Quarterly edited by Mark Christ and Patrick Williams.

Florida:

* From These Honored Dead: Historical Archaeology of the American Civil War edited by Clarence R. Geier, Douglas D. Scott, and Lawrence E. Babits.
* Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States by Paul D. Escott.

Georgia:

* America’s Corporal: James Tanner in War and Peace by James Marten.

Southern Illinois:

* Treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library by Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein.
* Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman by Joseph R. Fornieri.
* Lincoln's Campaign Biographies by Thomas A. Horrocks.
* We Called Him Rabbi Abraham: Lincoln and American Jewry, a Documentary History by Gary Phillip Zola.
* Lincoln and Religion by Ferenc Morton Szasz and Margaret Connell Szasz.

More spring '14 catalog news

Texas A&M:
* Lens on the Texas Frontier by Lawrence T. Jones III.
* The Red River Campaign The Union’s Final Attempt to Invade Texas by Gary D. Joiner (for State House Press).
* Letters from Prison: Jefferson Davis to his Wife, 1865–1866 edited by Felicity Allen (for Texas Review Press).
* Women of War: Selected Memoirs, Poems, and Fiction by Virginia Women Who Lived Through the Civil War edited by Casey Clabough (for Texas Review Press).

Oklahoma:
* The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow by Brian Steel Wills.
* Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives edited by Ronald K. Wetherington and Frances Levine [chosen for Civil War period content of Adobe Walls ('64) and Sand Creek ('64)].

Illinois:
nada

Johns Hopkins:
* Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War by Michael C.C. Adams.

Some Spring '14 catalog offerings

The first of the Spring/Summer 2014 university press catalogs are trickling out. I've listed below the Civil War period titles to be released by each. On a related note, it's also winter sale season for many of these presses. 

Kentucky:
* Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath edited by Andrew L. Slap

Kansas:
* Guide to the Richmond- Petersburg Campaign edited by Charles R. Bowery, Jr. and Ethan S. Rafuse.

LSU:
* Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present by John McKee Barr.
* Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln by Jonathan W. White.
* Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863 by Edited by Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword.

North Carolina:
* With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era by William A. Blair.
* Stonewall’s Prussian Mapmaker: The Journals of Captain Oscar Hinrichs edited by Richard Brady Williams.
* Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science by Shauna Devine.

Nebraska:
* Music Along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music, and Community during Winter Quarters, Virginia by James A. Davis.
* Manassas: A Battlefield Guide by Ethan S. Rafuse.
* A Lincoln Dialogue by James A. Rawley, edited by William G. Thomas.

Ohio:
* Citizen-General: Jacob Dolson Cox and the Civil War Era by Eugene D. Schmiel.
* Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History edited by Theodore J. Karamanski and Eileen M. McMahon.

Morgan's Great Raid

Morgan's Great Raid will be the subject of Blue & Gray Magazine's Volume XXX Issue #2. It's been visited before in Vols. XII and XV, but I don't mind as the magazine's main feature (the historical narrative and "General's Tour") just gets better and better over time.  Plus, site preservation is always in flux (in both positive and negative ways) and updates are welcome.

Some promising fall titles

Unlike spring, the fall titles from the university presses (so far) aren't really doing it for me. Savas Beatie, however, has a nice looking lineup according to their June newsletter.  It includes Bradley Gottfried's next atlas series title The Maps of the Bristoe Station and Mine Run Campaigns. They also have the first in-depth study of General Hooker's post-Fredericksburg reorganization and revitalization of the Army of the Potomac planned with Albert Conner and Chris Mackowski's Seizing Destiny: The Army of the Potomac’s “Valley Forge”. Finally, it's been so many years since I've corresponded with Kentuckian Don Rightmyer about a book project he was working on that I'd forgotten about it completely. Torn: The Civil War in Kentucky must be it. Don's also done a lot of work compiling a Civil War Kentucky bibliography as well as a camps & forts register, and the description mentions that both will be included in the volume.

Now, if only these advanced dates will be met. I swear I've been waiting for a constantly pushed back Big Bethel since April 2012!