This is the latest installment in the Civil War Classics series written by students in Professor Peter Carmichael’s graduate level readings course at West Virginia University. The following brief review of Jay Luvaas’s book, The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance, was written by Kati Singel. Click here for other reviews in [...]
Battlefield Interpretation
Debby Applegate The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Three Leaves, 2007). Anne J. Bailey, Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War (University of Georgia Press, 2006). George C. Bradley and Richard L. Dahlen, From Conquest to Conciliation: The Sack of Athens and the Court-Martial of Colonel John B. Turchin [...]
I just finished reading Scott Mingus’s book on the Louisiana Tigers for a review in the journal, Louisiana History. Mingus’s focus is specifically the Gettysburg Campaign (June-July 1863) Let me just say at the outset that I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Mingus has a command of the relevant primary sources and the book is well [...]
Some of you know that the cover story for the April issue of Civil War Times will feature my article on Confederate military executions. This is a project that I’ve had in the works for a couple of years, and although I am not finished thinking about the subject, I thought it might be worthwhile [...]
This is the final week of my survey course on the American Civil War. One of the subjects we’ve been looking at is the introduction of what Mark Grimsley describes as “Hard War” policy by the United States in 1864. The class was assigned a section of Grimsley’s book, Hard Hand of War: Union Military [...]
The following review of Richard Slotkin’s new book, No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, 1864 is now available in the latest edition of Civil War Book Review. With the publication of three books on the battle of the Crater in the past two years, one might reasonably ask if there is a need for [...]
Like many of you I’ve read John Keegan’s Face of Battle (1976) and can appreciate the contribution it made to the historiography of military history and its influence on countless Civil War historians who have written about the experience of the common soldier. Other than that, however, I haven’t read much of Keegan’s scholarship. I’m [...]
According to Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “John Latschar’s contributions to historic preservation cannot be overstated… His work has preserved and rehabilitated Gettysburg’s sacred ground and transformed the experience of visiting the battlefield for millions of annual visitors.” As far as I am concerned no one has worked harder to [...]
