Civil War Odds And Ends

The latest issue of the journal Civil War History includes a few announcements that readers may find of interest.  First, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries has completed a publicly accessible, full-text database of Pennsylvania Civil War Era newspapers.  The site includes digital facsimiles of newspapers from 10 Pennsylvania communities, including Gettysburg, Chambersburg, and Philadelphia. 

In the area of book prizes the Organization of American Historians has awarded Anne Sarah Rubin’s A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) the Avery O. Craven Award.  The Museum of the Confederacy also recently announced that While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (LSU Press, 2005) by Charles W. Sander has been awarded the 2005 Jefferson Davis Award. 

Congratulations to both authors.  I have not had a chance to read the second book, but I highly recommend Rubin’s book.  Rubin does not get bogged down with the question of whether Confederates managed to attain sufficient nationalism; rather, she examines the ways in which white southerners expressed their nationalism both through the war and into the immediate postwar years.  Click here for Michael Perman’s H-Net Review of Rubin’s study. 

I know they are both university press books, but you should be safe.