Category Archives: Books

Weekly Recap: Feb 17

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Here’s a recap of last week’s Civil War Podcast blog topics, and suggested readings for further study.

Post: How cotton remade the world
The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism.

Post: The Atlantic slave trade
Between 1492 and 1870, approximately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses. The Slave Trade is alive with villains and heroes and illuminated by eyewitness accounts. Hugh Thomas’s achievement is not only to present a compelling history of the time but to answer as well such controversial questions as who the traders were, the extent of the profits, and why so many African rulers and peoples willingly collaborated.

Post: Word origins
Jam-packed with many amazing facts, Stickler’s Sideburns and Bikinis is an intriguing and entertaining trip through the words and phrases that originated in the military but are now used by soldier and civilian alike.

Post: Post-war Lee
In The Man Who Would Not Be Washington, former White House speechwriter Jonathan Horn reveals how the officer most associated with Washington went to war against the union that Washington had forged. This extensively researched and gracefully written biography follows Lee through married life, military glory, and misfortune. The story that emerges is more complicated, more tragic, and more illuminating than the familiar tale. More complicated because the unresolved question of slavery—the driver of disunion—was among the personal legacies that Lee inherited from Washington. More tragic because the Civil War destroyed the people and places connecting Lee to Washington in agonizing and astonishing ways. More illuminating because the battle for Washington’s legacy shaped the nation that America is today.

Post: Civil War commemorations
Indispensable collection of 150 key places to see and things to do to remember and to honor the sacrifices made during America’s epic struggle. Covering dozens of states and the District of Columbia, this easy-to-use guide provides a concise text description and one or more images for each entry, as well as directions to all sites.

Post: Hawaii in the Civil War
Award-winning author Paul Taylor describes how the economic and military realities of the American Civil War affected the tiny Hawaiian kingdom halfway across the Pacific. For the Islands’ American residents, it was an opportunity to show their overwhelming support for the Union cause, however for the Hawaiian monarchs, the conflict was a political tightrope.

Post: Free State of Jones
In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War. Knight’s life story mirrors the little-known story of class struggle in the South—and it shatters the image of the Confederacy as a unified front against the Union.

Book review: Marching Home

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A new book deals with a subject I’ve been musing on lately: The effects of the war on the social life of postbellum America.  Millions of men coming home – some with severe physical and emotional scars – to a world that was profoundly changed.  This one sounds like a good read.

Jordan’s handling of civilian behavior toward Union veterans amounts to an unsparing indictment. Widespread callousness consigned former soldiers to “a living ‘republic of suffering.’ . . . Suspended between the dead and the living, the rest of their days were disturbed by memories of the war.” He allocates considerable attention to amputees and former prisoners of war. “Legions of men missing arms and legs,” he contends, posed a special problem for civilians because “throbbing stumps weeping a foul brew of pus and blood were hardly an advertisement for the kind of glorious, sanitized war the public wanted to remember.” Ex-prisoners suffered “enduring psychological injuries” and sought help from comrades who had shared their wartime nightmare. But “while ex-prisoner-of-war associations sustained prison survivors, they had scarcely moved the hearts and minds of the northern public. If anything, ex-prisoner meetings contributed to even greater public suspicion and scorn.” A reluctant nation did create a pension system (though many Americans came to view it “as a problem — not a paradigm”), and national and state soldiers’ homes assisted some of the poorest and least functional veterans.

Former soldiers offered one another empathy and help. They created the Grand Army of the Republic , the largest veterans’ organization and an increasingly powerful lobbying group, which Jordan describes as “one of the most significant social-welfare organizations of the nineteenth century.” They also wrote memoirs and unit histories, gathered at reunions, and erected monuments on battlefields and elsewhere — all to keep alive the memory of their sacrifice.

via Book review: Marching Home, by Brian Matthew Jordan – The Washington Post.

Weekly Recap: Feb 3

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Weekly Recap: Feb 3

Here’s a recap of last week’s Civil War Podcast blog topics, and suggested readings for further study.

Post: When the South Wasn’t a Fan of States’ Rights
In late 1860 and early 1861, state-appointed commissioners traveled the length and breadth of the slave South carrying a fervent message in pursuit of a clear goal: to persuade the political leadership and the citizenry of the uncommitted slave states to join in the effort to destroy the Union and forge a new Southern nation.
Directly refuting the neo-Confederate contention that slavery was neither the reason for secession nor the catalyst for the resulting onset of hostilities in 1861, Charles B. Dew finds in the commissioners’ brutally candid rhetoric a stark white supremacist ideology that proves the contrary.

Post: Newspaper Partisanship
A Press Divided provides new insights regarding the sharp political divisions that existed among the newspapers of the Civil War era. These newspapers were divided between North and South, and also divided within the North and South. These divisions reflected and exacerbated the conflicts in political thought that caused the Civil War and the political and ideological battles within the Union and the Confederacy about how to pursue the war.

Post: Lincolniana Auction
This informative Civil War collector’s guide will give you an idea of where to look, how much to pay, and how to keep mistakes to a minimum when collecting Civil War memorabilia. The author educates the reader on recognizing the value of items, emphasizes primary sources, and advises on collecting period representations. Additionally, strong focus is on the less obvious collectible with emphasis on detail and usage.

Post: Civil War Subs
Many people have heard of the Hunley, the experimental Confederate submarine that sank the USS Housatonic in a daring nighttime operation. Less well known, however, is that the Hunley was not alone under the waters of America during the Civil War. Both the Union and Confederacy built a wide and incredible array of vessels that could maneuver underwater, and many were put to use patrolling enemy waters. In Submarine Warfare in the Civil War, Mark Ragan, who spent years mining factory records and log books, brings this little-known history to the surface.The hardcover edition, Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War, was published to wide acclaim in 1999. For this new paperback edition, Ragan has revised and updated the text to include the full story of the Hunley’s recovery and restoration.
Submarine Warfare in the Civil War

Post: Greatest Confederate General
The Civil War Generals offers an unvarnished and largely unknown window into what military generals wrote and said about each other during the Civil War era. Drawing on more than 170 sources—including the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the general officers of the Union and Confederate armies, as well as their staff officers and other prominent figures—Civil War historian Robert Girardi has compiled a valuable record of who these generals were and how they were perceived by their peers. The quotations within paint revealing pictures of the private subjects at hand and, just as often, the people writing about them—a fascinating look at the many diverse personalities of Civil War leadership.

Post: Godfor the Battlefield Vulture
The clash of armies in the American Civil War left hundreds of thousands of men dead, wounded, or permanently damaged. Skirmishes and battles could result in casualty numbers as low as one or two and as high as tens of thousands. The carnage of the battlefield left a lasting impression on those who experienced or viewed it, but in most cases the armies quickly moved on to meet again at another time and place. When the dust settled and the living armies moved on, what happened to the dead left behind?

Post: Dixie’s Loss, Montana’s Gain
In 1862, gold discoveries brought thousands of miners to camps along Grasshopper Creek. By 1864, the Federal government had carved the Montana Territory out of the existing Idaho and Dakota Territories. Gold from Montana Territory fueled the Union war effort, yet loyalties were mixed among the miners. In this compelling collection of stories, historian Ken Robison illustrates how Southern sympathizers and Union loyalists, deserters and veterans, freed slaves and former slaveholders living side by side made a volatile and vibrant mix that molded Montana.

Weekly Recap: Jan 27

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Weekly Recap: Jan 27

Here’s a recap of last week’s Civil War Podcast blog topics, and suggested readings for further study.

 

Post: Southern Unionist Strongholds
The State of Jones
The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War—the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War. Knight’s life story mirrors the little-known story of class struggle in the South—and it shatters the image of the Confederacy as a unified front against the Union.

Post: Generals Who Fought Against Home & Country
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
It is to this question–why did they fight–that James McPherson, America’s preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism.

Weekly Recap: Jan 20

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Weekly Recap: Jan 20

Here’s a recap of last week’s Civil War Podcast blog topics, and suggested readings for further study.

Post: Whipping Man
God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Littlefield History of the Civil War Era)
Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Now, in God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, Lincoln Prize-winning historian George C. Rable offers a groundbreaking account of how Americans of all political and religious persuasions used faith to interpret the course of the war.

Post: Southern Jews & the Confederacy
Jews and the Civil War: A Reader
In Jews and the Civil War, Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn assemble for the first time the foremost scholarship on Jews and the Civil War, little known even to specialists in the field. These accessible and far-ranging essays from top scholars are grouped into seven thematic sections—Jews and Slavery, Jews and Abolition, Rabbis and the March to War, Jewish Soldiers during the Civil War, The Home Front, Jews as a Class, and Aftermath—each with an introduction by the editors. Together they reappraise the impact of the war on Jews in the North and the South, offering a rich and fascinating portrait of the experience of Jewish soldiers and civilians from the home front to the battle front.

Post: Grant’s Anti-Jewish Order
The Jewish Confederates (NS)
Reveals the breadth of Jewish participation in the American Civil War on the Confederate side. Rosen describes the Jewish communities in the South and explains their reasons for supporting the South. He relates the experiences of officers, enlisted men, politicians, rabbis and doctors.

Post: That Obnoxious Order
When General Grant Expelled the Jews
A riveting account of General Ulysses S. Grant’s decision, in the middle of the Civil War, to order the expulsion of all Jews from the territory under his command, and the reverberations of that decision on Grant’s political career, on the nascent American Jewish community, and on the American political process.

Post: Lincoln’s Coffin
Bloody Times: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Manhunt for Jefferson Davis

Two weeks later, President Lincoln was assassinated, and the nation was convinced that Davis was involved in the conspiracy that led to the crime. Lincoln’s murder, autopsy,and White House funeral transfixed the nation. His final journey began when soldiers placed his corpse aboard a special train that would carry him home to Springfield,Illinois. Along the way, more than a millionAmericans looked upon their martyr’s face,and several million watched the funeral train roll by. It was the most magnificent funeral pageant in American history.

Post: Point of Honor
This show and To Appomattox sound suspect. Why not watch Ken Burns’ The Civil War or Band of Brothers instead?

Weekly Recap: Jan 13

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Weekly Recap: Jan 13

Here’s a recap of last week’s Civil War Podcast blog topics, and suggested readings for further study.

Post: Wisconsin in the Civil War
This Wicked Rebellion: Wisconsin Civil War Soldiers Write Home
From impressions of army life and the South to the hardships of disease and battle, these letters tell the story of the war through the eyes and pens of those who fought in it. This Wicked Rebellion brings to life the heroism and heartache, mayhem and misery of the Civil War, and the powerful role Wisconsin played in it.

Post: Sherman and the burning of Columbia
Sherman and the Burning of Columbia
Marion B. Lucas tackles one of the most debated questions about the Civil War: Who burned South Carolina’s capital city on February 17, 1865? Before the fires had finished smoldering, Confederates and Federals accused each other of starting the blaze, igniting a controversy that has raged for more than a century. To determine the actual origin of the fire, Lucas sifts through myriad official records, newspapers, and eyewitness accounts. The evidence he amasses allows him to debunk many of the myths surrounding the tragedy.

Post: Blacks at the White House levees
Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker
Mrs Keckley described the levees in her behind the scenes role as dressmaker to Mary Lincoln.
Chiaverini’s latest is based on the true story of Elizabeth Keckley, who bought freedom from slavery for herself and her son and went on to become a well-known modiste in Washington. Keckley had a front-row seat to history: she dressed Washington’s A-list, including Jefferson Davis’ wife before they left D.C., and, most intimately, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Post: Long Reach of Civil War Wounds
Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Civil War America)
Devine does a remarkable job of showing how wartime experience catalyzed and reconfigured the evolution of American medicine along scientific lines, stimulating vastly increased attention to pathological investigation, experimentation, specialization, and probing of the nature of disease.

Post: Lincoln’s War With the Press
Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
Holzer shows us an activist Lincoln through journalists who covered him from his start through to the night of his assassination—when one reporter ran to the box where Lincoln was shot and emerged to write the story covered with blood. In a wholly original way, Holzer shows us politicized newspaper editors battling for power, and a masterly president using the press to speak directly to the people and shape the nation.

Post: Unfriendly Fires
Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1867
Known collectively as the United States Colored Troops and organized in segregated regiments led by white officers, some of these soldiers guarded army posts along major rivers; others fought Confederate raiders to protect Union supply trains, and still others took part in major operations like the Siege of Petersburg and the Battle of Nashville. After the war, many of the black regiments took up posts in the former Confederacy to enforce federal Reconstruction policy. Freedom by the Sword tells the story of these soldiers’ recruitment, organization, and service.

Post: King Cotton
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

Lincoln’s War With the Press

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Lincoln’s relationship with the press was an ongoing source of drama and great quotes.  Now, Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer has released a new book on the topic, and it looks intriguing.   That revelation about Lincoln’s co-ownership of a newspaper is a particular surprise.

Throughout his career, Lincoln understood the urgency, and difficulty, of using the press, especially since during election season presidential candidates were expected to stay home and not campaign.

“Public sentiment is everything,” he said during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, and he went to great lengths to shape that sentiment — including writing editorials himself, anonymously, and even, for a time, secretly co-owning a German-language newspaper in Illinois.

As president he spent hours tending to the prodigious egos of important newspaper editors and cultivating the goodwill of energetic young reporters. Journalists would show up at the White House, uninvited, at odd hours, and the president would have them in, put his feet up on his desk and exchange news and gossip, no matter how weary he was.

via Lessons of Abraham Lincoln’s war with the press: Commentary | masslive.com.

Weekly Recap: Jan 6

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Here’s a recap of last week’s Civil War Podcast blog topics, and suggested readings for further study.

Post: Douglass in Ireland
Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary

In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass’s 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass–from its wild landscape (“I have travelled almost from the hill of ‘Howth’ to the Giant’s Causeway”) to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a “thorough and uncommonly graceful historian.” Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin’s new book makes Douglass’s historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave’s growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life.

Post: Children of Veterans
Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Civil War America)
After the Civil War, white Confederate and Union army veterans reentered–or struggled to reenter–the lives and communities they had left behind. In Sing Not War, James Marten explores how the nineteenth century’s “Greatest Generation” attempted to blend back into society and how their experiences were treated by non-veterans.

Post: The Smell of War
The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War
From the eardrum-shattering barrage of shells announcing the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter; to the stench produced by the corpses lying in the mid-summer sun at Gettysburg; to the siege of Vicksburg, once a center of Southern culinary aesthetics and starved into submission, Smith recreates how Civil War was felt and lived. Relying on first-hand accounts, Smith focuses on specific senses, one for each event, offering a wholly new perspective.

Post: Ford’s Theatre Witness
Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre
This is the untold story of Lincoln’s assassination: the forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night, and what each of them witnessed in the chaos-streaked hours before John Wilkes Booth was discovered to be the culprit. In Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, historian Thomas A. Bogar delves into previously unpublished sources to tell the story of Lincoln’s assassination from behind the curtain, and the tale is shocking. Police rounded up and arrested dozens of innocent people, wasting time that allowed the real culprit to get further away. Some closely connected to John Wilkes Booth were not even questioned, while innocent witnesses were relentlessly pursued. Booth was more connected with the production than you might have known—learn how he knew each member of the cast and crew, which was a hotbed of secessionist resentment. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination also tells the story of what happened to each of these witnesses to history, after the investigation was over—how each one lived their lives after seeing one of America’s greatest presidents shot dead without warning.

Post: Irish in the Civil War
The Irish in the American Civil War (Irish in the World)
This is the story of the forgotten role of the 200,000 Irish men and women who were involved in various ways in the US Civil War. This book is based on several years of research by the author, a professional historian, who has put together a series of the best of his collected stories for this collection. The book is broken into four sections, ‘beginnings’, ‘realities’, ‘the wider war’ and ‘aftermath’. Within each section there are six true stories of gallantry, sacrifice and bravery, from the flag bearer who saved his regimental colours at the cost of his arms, to the story of Jennie Hodgers, who pretended to be a man and served throughout the war in the 95th Illinois.

Post: Civil War PTSD
Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War
Employing a multidisciplinary approach that merges military, medical, and social history, Dean draws on individual case analyses and quantitative methods to trace the reactions of Civil War veterans to combat and death. He seeks to determine whether exuberant parades in the North and sectional adulation in the South helped to wash away memories of violence for the Civil War veteran. His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence.

Post: A Broken Regiment
A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War)
The struggles of the 16th led survivors to reflect on the true nature of their military experience during and after the war, and questions of cowardice and courage, patriotism and purpose, were often foremost in their thoughts. Over time, competing stories emerged of who they were, why they endured what they did, and how they should be remembered. By the end of the century, their collective recollections reshaped this troubling and traumatic past, and the “unfortunate regiment” emerged as the “Brave Sixteenth,” their individual memories and accounts altered to fit the more heroic contours of the Union victory.

A Broken Regiment

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The Smithsonian article I posted previously mentioned a new book that sounds fascinating: A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War.  The author has researched one badly mauled regiment to gauge how its veterans did after the war. Predictably, they didn’t do too well.

At war’s end, the emotional toll on returning soldiers was often compounded by physical wounds and lingering ailments such as rheumatism, malaria and chronic diarrhea. While it’s impossible to put a number on this suffering, historian Lesley Gordon followed the men of a single unit, the 16th Connecticut regiment, from home to war and back again and found “the war had a very long and devastating reach.”

The men of the 16th had only just been mustered in 1862, and barely trained, when they were ordered into battle at Antietam, the bloodiest day of combat in U.S. history. The raw recruits rushed straight into a Confederate crossfire and then broke and ran, suffering 25 percent casualties within minutes. “We were murdered,” one soldier wrote.

In a later battle, almost all the men of the 16th were captured and sent to the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, where a third of them died from disease, exposure and starvation. Upon returning home, many of the survivors became invalids, emotionally numb, or abusive of family. Alfred Avery, traumatized at Antietam, was described as “more or less irrational as long as he lived.” William Hancock, who had gone off to war “a strong young man,” his sister wrote, returned so “broken in body and mind” that he didn’t know his own name. Wallace Woodford flailed in his sleep, dreaming that he was still searching for food at Andersonville. He perished at age 22, and was buried beneath a headstone that reads: “8 months a sufferer in Rebel prison; He came home to die.”

 

A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (Conflicting Words: New Dimensions of the American Civil War): Lesley J. Gordon: 9780807157305: Amazon.com: Books.

The Smell of the Civil War

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A short article from Smithsonian.com mentions an intriguing new book.  Given the subject, I’m guessing it will be a lot like the morose yet fascinating This Republic of Suffering.  I’ve added it to my wish list.

Caroline Hancock was 23 when she served as a nurse after the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863. She found the smell of the decaying bodies so strong that “she viewed it as an oppressive, malignant force, capable of killing the wounded men who were forced to lie amid the corpses until the medical corps could reach them,” writes Rebecca Onion for Slate’s history blog, The Vault. Hancock’s account is published in a new book called The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War, by Mark Smith, a history professor at the University of South Carolina.

via A Nurse Describes the Smell of the Civil War | Smart News | Smithsonian.