Civil War Historiography Research Articles

Loss and Found: Barthes, Hidden Biography and Ethical Deficit in Alexander Gardner’s ‘Portrait of Lewis Payne’

The reconsideration of the symbolic landscape of the Civil War and Confederate iconography since events in Charleston, Charlottesville, and Minneapolis points toward a necessary reappraisal of Alexander Gardner’s 1865 portrait of Lincoln conspirator Lewis Payne (real name Lewis Powell), and its use by Roland Barthes as an illustration for his seminal 1980 book Camera Lucida. Barthes uses the photograph to illustrate a conceptual shift from the punctum, as an individual affect for the viewer, to the noeme, or ‘that-has-been’ appreciable in all photographs. As a result of an emblematic approach using a combination of motto, subscriptio, and illustration, key details of the photograph are misrepresented, and key features of Powell’s Confederate identity are erased. This study therefore explores the circumstances of the photograph’s production, its precarious existence as an unprinted cast-off, and its eventual appreciation as a distinctive example of portraiture’s power. Whereas in Civil War historiography Powell and this photograph are little more than footnotes, the debate around Confederate statues and symbols now begs the question of how the photograph should be contextualised in photography, media and cultural studies, where it has its greatest visibility by far.

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

The Sexuality of Civil War Historiography: How Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War

The Sexuality of Civil War HistoriographyHow Two Versions of Homosexuality Make Meaning of the War Andrew Donnelly (bio) The central scene in James K. Hosmer’s 1865 novel The Thinking Bayonet takes place in a Confederate prison camp. Two men, a Union solder and a Confederate soldier, say farewell: “Hands for a moment on one another’s shoulders; bearded faces, damp with the rain now falling, coming together under the dark in a kiss.” At a college in Massachusetts, the pair had been intimates who, as a classmate wrote, “have a love for one another, almost surpassing the love of women.” They broke up over the issue of slavery, when the Southerner returned to his family’s slave plantation in Louisiana and the Northerner became involved in Massachusetts abolitionism. The Southerner enlisted in the Confederate army, declaring, “I hate the North . . . and yet the only man I ever loved was a Northerner.” Coincidentally overhearing this declaration, the Northerner resolved to fight his onetime friend, “I say it while I love him.”1 The prison kiss is their last. The novel ends with the Southerner, his Confederacy, and their romantic friendship all dead, deaths necessary both for national reunion and the Northerner’s eventual heterosexual marriage. Hosmer, a Harvard graduate who served as an infantryman in the Union campaign for the southern Mississippi River, framed the crisis in his novel within the broad “we are not enemies but friends” framework of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”2 Hosmer’s novel did so by narrating the war [End Page 295] as the destruction of romantic and homoerotic bonds between white men. The novel’s antebellum nostalgia celebrates their intimacy as of the past, strained already equally by their advancement beyond college and by their places in the sectional conflict. Even then, the novel suggests that a paired adulthood was impossible, requiring the intervention of the Civil War to end it. The war transforms their intimacy to a thing possible only in the past, ruptured by death and replaced by marriage. Antebellum white men had celebrated romantic friendship as a stable model of republican society and the ties that bind male citizens; postbellum novelists like Hosmer imagined these friendships within a developmental framework that moved from youthful intimacies to disunion to adult heterosexuality.3 His and several other novels written during and after the war continued an antebellum trend of using intimate male friendships to think about the problems of national unity.4 In these novels, the Civil War became an event within a trajectory of male development, necessary for the maturation from youthful homo-eroticism to adult heterosexuality. As such, the novels offered an interpretation of the war: the more intense the intimacies between the two young men, the more the war appears as the tragic loss of a past that cannot return. The closer the men advance toward the impossibility of a same-sex paired adulthood, the more the war appears as fatalistically preordained for antebellum society. Hosmer’s interpretation of the war is not simply about the outcome on the battlefield but is narrated as a tragedy for the relationships between men. The war ended the homoerotic relationship, and reunion offered a new stage of heterosexual maturity. Hosmer interpreted the war not only as a novelist but also [End Page 296] as a Civil War historian. Forty-two years after The Thinking Bayonet, he wrote a history of the conflict for Albert Bushnell Hart’s American Nation series in volume 20, The Appeal to Arms, 1861–1863, and volume 21, Outcome of the Civil War, 1863–1865.5 Unlike his 1865 novel, Hosmer’s history contains no cross-sectional kisses; nonetheless, his history plays out at grand scale the relationship between his male heroes. Like the novel, Hosmer’s history made the war primarily about the intensity of feeling between white men: Northerners led to war by aggressive abolitionist voices and Southerners, with misperceptions of their power, launching a misguided effort to defend the already doomed system of slavery. This essay covers the roughly four decades for which Hosmer’s novel and two-volume history...

Reconstruction and Mormon America

In 2002, then-president of the Western History Association Elliott West introduced the concept of “Greater Reconstruction.” West posited that while histories of nineteenth-century America were dominated by the nation's westward expansion and the Civil War and its aftermath, the field might benefit from treating these simultaneous events as portions of one larger process of American nation-building that prioritized federal power and remade the United States. It has now been more than twenty years since West's initial paper, and the concept of Greater Reconstruction has pushed the field in many interesting directions since then, opening the door to comparative scholarship that has expanded the historiography of Civil War era.One of the fields that has most benefitted from this concept has been Mormon history, and Reconstruction and Mormon America is a perfect example. Originating from a seminar hosted by the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University, this edited collection is a meditation on the fields of Reconstruction and Mormon history, thoroughly considering the applicability of Greater Reconstruction in territorial Utah and thoughtfully comparing Latter-day Saint experiences with white and Black Americans in the U.S. South, as well as Indigenous Americans in the U.S. West.The book consists of an introduction (appropriately written by Elliott West) and three main parts, each consisting of a short preface and three longer essays. The first section is the most contextual, focused on how assimilation efforts by the federal government in Utah fit in with state-building efforts elsewhere. Angela Pulley Hudson leads off, with a brilliant analysis of why there is no “Mormon Trail of Tears.” As settlers themselves, Mormons were often the perpetrators and beneficiaries of settler colonialism, she says. Hudson also calls into question the value of the framework of Greater Reconstruction, because the comparison of Mormon and Indigenous assimilation efforts by the government obfuscates the unique brand of state violence against Indigenous peoples, in which “Mormons have been enthusiastic, if not always welcome, participants” (20). Christine Talbot comes next, focusing on Republican efforts to remake America's social structure by not only abolishing slavery, but by remaking the nuclear family by eradicating polygamy and plantation-style patriarchy. She also makes insightful comparisons between the mid-nineteenth century concepts of free labor and companionate marriage. Patrick Mason finishes the first section with an analysis of “legitimate violence” and the state, concluding that Mormon Utah was subject to what he calls “disciplinary democracy,” which ultimately implied the religion's eventual assimilability in the larger state, though it had to accept federal force for that to occur.The next section is more specific to Reconstruction itself, with both Brett Dowdle and Brent Rogers arguing that Utah is a prime example of the development of federal supremacy in the post-Civil War United States. This applied to territorial administration and legislative action, as well as cultural and social pressures. Mormons, like other American “others,” were indeed subject to federal assimilation efforts, though there were differences in the groups. Rachel St. John, however, pushes against this conclusion, arguing that expanding the concept of Reconstruction to all assimilation efforts diminishes the framework's usefulness.The final section focuses on the legacy of Mormon Reconstruction, where the three authors (Clyde Milner, Eric Eliason, and Jared Farmer) ponder why there is no Mormon “Lost Cause” comparable to the legacy of the Confederacy in the southern United States. In all, the authors largely agree that Mormons have side-stepped the issue in many clever ways, such as prioritizing “pioneer” heritage in their commemorations, which situates them as agents of national development rather than dissatisfied refugees, or by truly giving up on the elements of their faith that were lost, such as polygamy.In all, Reconstruction and Mormon America is an excellent collection that succinctly and cogently ties together many excellent stand-alone essays into an insightful historiographical reflection. Each of the essays would work well in undergraduate or graduate seminars, and the book as a whole is essential for any reader attempting to understand the current state of either Mormon or Reconstruction history. This is a solid contribution to the field.

Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner

Reviewed by: Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner Jeffrey Zvengrowski (bio) Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain. By Michael J. Turner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 334. Cloth, $50.00.) Michael J. Turner looks at an old topic in Civil War historiography, pro-Confederate sympathy in abolitionist Britain, from an intriguing new angle. He does so by focusing on the career of Beresford Hope, an important British sympathizer with the Confederacy, whom scholars of the Civil War have hitherto neglected. An antidemocratic Conservative politician, influential "High Church" Anglican, and wealthy public intellectual, Hope favored free trade while distrusting centralized governmental power. The first section of Turner's book examines Hope's leading role among pro-Confederate Britons, many of whom shared most of Hope's cultural inclinations and political views. Turner also explains how those Britons could work with proslavery Confederate agents despite being nominally opposed to slavery, which Hope claimed the Confederacy would gradually eliminate even as he presented plantations in the South as decently Christian institutions that functioned akin to paternalistic British agricultural estates. Hope and like-minded Britons accordingly avoided the proslavery "racial argument" as "embarrassing" while insisting that northerners actually "were more racially prejudiced than southerners" (72, 90). In Hope's view, non-British immigration and un-Anglican ideas of atheism, democracy, and racism had corrupted the Union to a far greater [End Page 134] degree than the Confederacy, where Hope believed that English bloodlines, culture, and religion might grow even purer than in industrializing, urbanizing England—let alone the U.S. North. After skillfully recounting Hope's pro-Confederate activism and opinions, Turner emphasizes that pro-Confederate Britons and their Confederate collaborators on both sides of the Atlantic vested hopes in Confederate general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. They romanticized Jackson as a devout and properly Protestant inspiration to the enslaved and soldiers alike and a charmingly eccentric military genius of pure Anglo-Saxon ancestry, who confounded the massive Union armies that embodied everything about modernity that they disdained and feared. Attributing the Confederacy's ultimate destruction in 1865 to Jackson's untimely death in 1863, Hope and other pro-Confederate Britons raised impressive sums to commission a statue of the deceased Confederate general in Britain. That statue would eventually be unveiled and installed in Richmond, Virginia, soon after pro-British ex-Confederates came to power in Virginia during the mid-1870s. As a whole, Turner's book features a cumulative and culminative structure that is remarkably harmonious and very pleasing to read. His work also boasts voluminous primary sources, including archival manuscripts, published documents, and, above all, British newspapers. Turner, moreover, intelligently engages with relevant secondary sources to a degree that is usually edifying but not pedantic, although chapter 1 is a fairly laborious exception. His laudable style of writing is refreshingly free from jargon and unexplained technical terms, too, with minor exceptions in chapter 5. Furthermore, Turner happily avoids moralizing and "presentist" analysis, with the lamentable exception of his book's conclusion, much of which already seems strikingly dated owing to events that have transpired in Richmond since 2020. Turner's book contains the occasional repetitive fact and description as well as a handful of typos, but a much greater irritation that is found on far more pages is his contradiction-inducing assumption that Hope and other pro-Confederate Britons were actually in "agreement with southerners' own self-definition" (10). Turner's chapters are replete with evidence, hints, and even sporadic admissions that more than a few Confederates did not agree with the worldview of Hope's pro-British Confederate associates (see, for instance, 62, 64–65, 68–69, 104, 118, 160, 174–75, and 299). Turner, moreover, assiduously avoids acknowledging that pro-Confederate Britons and pro-British Confederates were frequently at odds with both the British and Confederate governments, which regularly antagonized each other much to the chagrin of the pro-Confederate minority in Britain [End Page 135] and the pro-British minority in the Confederacy. Turner does note, however, that even though Hope stomached assisting Henry Hotze, a Swissborn Confederate...

Charleston, City of Mourners: Anticipations of Civil War in the Cradle of Secession

Charleston, City of MournersAnticipations of Civil War in the Cradle of Secession Michael E. Woods (bio) On Saturday morning, January 19, 1861, a Northern journalist steamed into Charleston Harbor aboard the Columbia. Skirting the “massive, commanding, and formidable” hulk of Fort Sumter, the ship docked at the nascent republic of South Carolina. The unnamed correspondent stayed ten days, taking the pulse of a citizenry energized, and yet divided, by the prospect of war. Everywhere, Charlestonians discussed “those two eternal subjects, Secession and Fort Sumter.” Secession was electrifying; Sumter was vexing. Perched on an island three miles from downtown, the fortress defied armchair strategists, whose schemes for seizing it ranged from frontal attacks to stink bombs that would drive the garrison back to Yankeedom. “Young and thoughtless” hotspurs craved war, but many of their elders gagged at the idea of risking their genteel lives against the “gang of Irishmen, Germans, British deserters, and New York roughs” manning the fort. Excruciating anxiety united white Charlestonians: how long would they teeter on the verge of combat? Locals postponed clothing purchases, lest Sumter’s guns rake the city and compel them to wear mourning black. They flinched when doors slammed and quivered when cannons fired, even to celebrate Louisiana’s secession on the twenty-sixth. And always, their conversations circled back to the awaited assault. One impatient soldier loudly berated a civilian friend: “‘Why, good Heaven, Jim! do you want that place to go peaceably into the hands of Lincoln?’” Jim emphatically denied the charge, but added a warning. “‘I tell you, Fred, when the fort is attacked, it will be the bloodiest day,—the bloodiest day!—the bloodiest—!!’” Suddenly speechless, [End Page 7] Jim “flung his arms wildly about, ground his tobacco with excitement, spit on all sides, and walked away, shaking his head . . . in real grief of spirit.”1 Three themes pervade the journalist’s account: Fort Sumter’s strength, dread of a costly assault, and anticipations of an even bloodier civil war. Since late December 1860, secessionists had coveted the fort, the last Federal stronghold in the Palmetto State. But white Charlestonians differed over the expediency of an assault. Many envisioned appalling short- and long-term consequences. Would Charleston Harbor run red with the blood of Carolina’s finest? Would the resulting war claim even more lives? Despite Charleston’s reputation for fire-eating politics and military ardor, these questions plagued the city’s diverse white population during the secession winter of 1860–61. Charlestonians did not rush blindly into a catastrophe, in part because Fort Sumter constantly reminded them of war’s grim costs. Yet, their candid forecasts of a bloody and protracted conflict did not foster an organized peace movement, largely because the meanings of “bloody war” talk varied widely. As Elizabeth R. Varon has shown, antebellum Americans used “disunion” discourse to predict the future, threaten rivals, and tar opponents as traitors.2 After South Carolina seceded, anticipations of war played similarly diverse roles in Charlestonians’ public and private discussions of the future. Ardent secessionists, reluctant disunionists, and unionists appealed to the prospect of bloodshed for their own purposes. Forebodings of violence at Fort Sumter and beyond did not uniformly point toward moderation or compromise. This emphasis on powerful but diverse anticipations of bloodshed cuts against the grain of Civil War historiography. Often, the bombardment of Fort Sumter serves as an ironic interlude between secessionist vitriol and Civil War carnage or as a milestone on Americans’ impulsive rush to war. That Sumter’s defenders capitulated after an artillery duel that killed no one is, in retrospect, ironic, given the slaughter soon to come. According to one oft-repeated phrase, the bombardment was “a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American history.”3 That Sumter was undermanned and unfinished after three decades of [End Page 8] fitful construction enhances its symbolic significance. Like the incomplete US Capitol dome or the half-built Washington Monument, Sumter’s unmounted guns and empty embrasures readily represent the nation’s political and military immaturity. Dismissed by one historian as “unfit for service,” Fort Sumter provides an ideal setting for tales of naïfs plunging into the abyss.4 Embedded in these narratives...

Historiography of the Causes of the Civil War

Civil War historiography is usually reserved for the pages of academic journals. But a series of events in 2017, amidst the ongoing debates about the removal of Confederate monuments, thrust the discussion about the Civil War's causation onto the front pages of newspapers and news websites. First, in an April 2017 radio interview, President Donald Trump questioned why politicians could not find a compromise to avert the Civil War. In October of the same year, President Trump’s then-chief of staff John Kelly expressed a similar sentiment, arguing that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War….” The front-page news underscored what historian Charles B. Dew acknowledged was “probably the most hotly debated issue in American history.” This paper seeks to summarize the major trends in the historiography of the causes of the Civil War, while also acknowledging that the secondary sources are massive. Only a small sample of the many thousands of histories can be presented here.

New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon

Reviewed by: New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon Matthew Mason (bio) New Perspectives on the Union War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Pp. 256. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) This is an unusually cohesive edited collection, speaking to one over-arching theme: the many faces of the Union cause in the American Civil War. The editors’ own previous pathbreaking work on this theme and the contributors’ tight connections to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia make the thematic unity unsurprising. But less guaranteed was the high quality of the essays across the board, and the wide variety of viewpoints on the Union cause that they represent. The collective and individual excellence of the essays takes two important forms. First, although they range widely in subject matter, they all make key contributions to the volume. Even essays that seem like the answer to the question, Which one of these things is not like the other?— like Tamika Y. Nunley’s exploration of the Civil War career of free black Washington, D.C., fixture Elizabeth Keckly or Michael T. Caires’s essay on Salmon P. Chase’s pursuit of a national banking system—add key elements to the book’s whole picture. Second, they all make important interventions in other historiographies. For instance, Frank J. Cirillo’s discussion of Abby Kelley Foster’s and Stephen Foster’s wartime careers seeks to qualify the idea, associated most strongly with James Oakes, that the war was antislavery for Republicans from the beginning. Jack Furniss’s close attention to Horatio Seymour’s political appeal seeks to focus wartime northern political history less on voters’ reactions against the Republicans than on their positive support for Democrats. D. H. Dilbeck applies the much-studied Francis Lieber’s [End Page 414] ideas to questioning the “dark turn” in Civil War historiography. Even Peter C. Luebke’s essay, which at its outset seems like the least significant historiographical foray because he examines the regimental histories that Gallagher uses to such effect in his Union War (2011), ends up speaking effectively to the massive literature on postwar memory. The volume shines unprecedented light on the wide range of political viewpoints housed in the big tent that was the Union war. The editors begin their laudably brief and insightful introduction with William Tecumseh Sherman’s statement that “the National Feeling . . . assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union” (1). The shapes represented here include the views of radical abolitionists, free African Americans, Democrats both Protestant and Catholic, Republicans of all factions, and veterans of various political stripes. And the issues with which they were concerned also ran a full gamut; as Caires phrases it, “concern for Union” included but “extended far beyond the political sphere or the battlefield” (160). These essays display the depths of division over fundamental questions within that broad Unionist persuasion. So, for instance, we see Furniss’s Seymour and Jesse George-Nichol’s Edward Bates asserting that a conservative approach to the war dictated a limited, cautious strategy, while Dilbeck’s Lieber insisted that “the more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief ” (144). And all but the most conservative of these Unionists embraced the idea of emancipation in the abstract, but as Furniss puts it well, “questions of timing and method were critical” for all of them (79). Another major point of variance was the degree to which these characters thought of the war to preserve the Union as an end in itself or as a means to some other end. The Fosters, for example, “cast their patriotism as support not for the Union as it was but for the Union as it should be,” entirely free of the stain of slavery (10). Salmon P. Chase and his supporters wielded Unionism to tar opponents of the national banking system with the brush of “South Carolina treason” (177). Likewise, Keckly and her collaborators sought to leverage the war to advance the rights of African Americans both free and...

The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael

Reviewed by: The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies by Peter S. Carmichael Jonathan M. Steplyk (bio) The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies. By Peter S. Carmichael. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 408. $34.95 cloth; $27.99 ebook) The study of the common soldier represents one of the most storied and engaging fields within Civil War historiography. Soldier [End Page 360] studies range from broad surveys of soldier life, such as Bell I. Wiley's studies of "Johnny Reb" and "Billy Yank" and Reid Mitchell's Civil War Soldiers (1988), to explorations of specific topics, such as James McPherson's study of soldier motivation in For Cause and Comrades (1997) and Chandra Manning's examination of soldiers' attitudes toward slavery in What This Cruel War Was Over (2007). In The War for the Common Soldier, Peter Carmichael offers a new soldier study that is both broad in scope and intense in focus, arguing that Civil War soldiers, caught between romanticized notions of conduct and conflict and war's harsh realities, espoused a "hard-edged pragmatism" that privileged victory and survival (p. 7). Carmichael casts his work as a study not of what Civil War soldiers thought but how they thought. He presents Yankees and Rebels as citizen-soldiers whose sentimentalized notions of warfare and manly conduct were challenged by the rigors of homesickness, privation, terror, loss, and doubt. He concludes that "pragmatism gave them the flexibility to act in ways that actually helped them preserve their faith in ideas" (p. 8). Carmichael's work might be understood as a middle ground between Gerald Linderman, who suggested Civil War soldiers' prewar values did not survive the brutality of combat, and James McPherson, who argued that ideology and comradeship sustained most men throughout the war. Carmichael's conclusions align more closely to McPherson's—he finds soldiers' religious beliefs, national identity, and sense of duty generally survived contact with the enemy, yet these elements did not necessarily provide conclusive answers to the trials they faced. A soldier's Christian faith might endure, yet he still might struggle with why God should delay or withhold victory on the battlefield. A veteran might espouse his cause to the bitter end but still rationalize attaining a safer post or even desertion. Carmichael contests the notion that deserters and skulkers were simply lacking in ideology or commitment. "Emotional management" is a key concept in the book and for Carmichael's soldiers, the life of the mind is as much a battlefield as the war's actual killing fields. [End Page 361] Carmichael structures his work around seven thematic chapters, addressing topics that include adjusting to military life, religion and values, letters home, competing ideas of courage and cowardice, desertion and military justice, attitudes toward the enemy and the war's outcome, and the collection and preservation of wartime relics. Each chapter centers on case studies of writings by several Union and Confederate soldiers through which Carmichael explicates how they responded and adapted to the war's challenges. As with a needle and thread, Carmichael weaves his analysis between in-depth examination of his core individuals and supporting evidence from other soldiers while drawing out his broader conclusions. This hybrid of macro- and micro-investigation might at times prove challenging to the reader, but more often than not Carmichael makes it work. Among his many intriguing observations is the suggestion that Union soldiers were far more likely to enjoy irony and self-mockery amid the war's hardships than their Rebel foes. Yankees could laugh at themselves even as their patriotism and sense of purpose endured, while a steely absolutism marked most Confederates' self-image. Did this reflect the rigid code of southern honor? Did it stem from Confederates' sense that the war had much more immediate physical and emotional stakes for them than their foes? Carmichael encourages us to ponder such questions with him. In The War for the Common Soldier, fighting men's worldviews bend but do not necessarily break as they are tried by fire. Carmichael plumbs the psyches...

Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi. Volume 3: Essays on America’s Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott

Reviewed by: Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi. Volume 3: Essays on America’s Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott Matthew M. Stith Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi. Volume 3: Essays on America’s Civil War. Edited by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott. Foreword by Daniel E. Sutherland. The Western Theater in the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 374. $64.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-454-0.) Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott have produced a third and final volume in their excellent series on Confederate generalship in the trans-Mississippi theater. The first two volumes—published in 2013 and 2015 and spearheaded by the late Arthur W. Bergeron—explore the lives of a host of Confederate generals who have collectively attracted as much criticism from some modern historians as they did from their contemporaries. Some of this critique was quite warranted indeed, but at the heart of these volumes lies a more nuanced and careful appraisal. Among the greatest strengths of all three volumes of Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi is how rebel commanders on the western edge of the Confederate South are carefully placed in proper situational and political contexts. This latest installment reflects the strengths of the first two volumes splendidly by bringing eight fine essays about both well-known and obscure generals who plied their trade west of the Mississippi River. Taken as a whole, these volumes serve as yet more evidence that underscores the reality that the trans-Mississippi West, though on the geographical edge of the Confederacy, fits squarely and deservedly in the center of Civil War historiography. The volume’s first contributions examine the motivations and careers of two examples of inept Confederate leadership west of the Mississippi River. First, General Earl Van Dorn was among the most maligned commanders of the war, [End Page 485] especially in the trans-Mississippi theater. His wartime career path from capable administrator and effective cavalry commander in 1861 to dismal performer as army commander in 1862 reflects the complexity inherent in even the most troubled commands. Ultimately, however, Joseph G. Dawson III shows that Van Dorn’s loss at the battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862, coupled by other failures, relegates the commander into the “lower one-quarter” of Confederate generals in the Confederate South (p. 25). Much like Van Dorn, General Hamilton Prioleau Bee earned an exceedingly poor reputation due to command ineptitude, albeit on a less publicized stage. As Richard H. Holloway makes clear, Bee’s poor performance in the Red River campaign—namely, his panic and retreat at Monett’s Ferry—stained his wartime career and sentenced him to years of postwar fighting to mend his status. In sharp contrast to Van Dorn and Bee, General James Fleming Fagan, as Stuart W. Sanders contends, was among the finest Confederate generals in the trans-Mississippi. Sanders’s essay helps clarify and revive Fagan’s leadership ability. Sanders places Fagan’s missteps at Pilot Knob, Missouri, and Marks’ Mills, Arkansas, during the war—and his Republican scalawagery after it—in context of his otherwise solid leadership. Jeffery S. Prushankin similarly gives General Edmund Kirby Smith his proper due. Prushankin illuminates the corrosive nature of command politics in the trans-Mississippi by the second half of the war by examining the high hopes and ultimate despondency of one of the more promising Confederate generals. Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi Department was falling to pieces by 1863. Indeed, Prushankin makes clear, the “constant demands of politicians and the carping of his subordinates,” atop gloomy prospects against the enemy, proved too much for Kirby Smith to handle and reflected the complications inherent in the Confederate command structure west of the Mississippi (p. 116). Holloway’s second essay provides a look into the stymied career of William Robertson Boggs and his actions in Louisiana. Boggs had a great deal of potential and an impressive resume before 1861, but, as Holloway shows, the general was attached to Kirby Smith’s staff and never saw significant direct leadership until the very end of the war in Louisiana. Thomas Green had a quite different career. Curtis Milbourn...

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future

The story has been retold so often that Civil War historians and enthusiasts know it by heart: in spring 1861, eager volunteers flocked to enlist before they missed out on what everyone knew would be a short and triumphant war. Instead, the boys of 1861 plunged into a grinding bloodbath that shattered their innocence and forged a modern nation. This account is not pure fiction, but, as Jason Phillips shows, it is woefully incomplete, not least because it privileges the views of zealous young white men over those of other Americans, from enslaved people who prayed for “jubilee” to border-state citizens who feared Armageddon. Yet Phillips goes far beyond myth busting in this superbly crafted book. By exploring how religion, material culture, and notions of time shaped Americans' prognostications, he weaves diverse forecasts into a sophisticated study that makes an excellent contribution to Civil War historiography. The book ranges widely, from the concept of the universal telegraph to the career of the self-styled prophet Edmund Ruffin, but several key themes tie it together. One is the distinction between two temporalities: anticipation and expectation. Anticipators believed that they forged their own futures through proactive effort, while expectant Americans envisioned future events, already determined by forces beyond human control, moving toward them. Given the realities of antebellum law and culture, it would be tempting to generalize anticipation as male, white, and martial, and expectation as female, black, and civilian. But Phillips identifies patterns without putting people in boxes. Few Americans struck more boldly for anticipated freedom than Harriet Tubman, while Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth spent much of the war expecting a grim future. War itself could wrench people from one temporality to another, humbling the anticipations of glory-seeking soldiers or enabling enslaved people to grasp a freedom they long expected would come in God's own time.

The Seventh West Virginia Infantry: An Embattled Union Regiment from the Civil War's Most Divided State by David W. Mellott and Mark A. Snell

Reviewed by: The Seventh West Virginia Infantry: An Embattled Union Regiment from the Civil War's Most Divided State by David W. Mellott and Mark A. Snell Glenn Longacre Archivist The Seventh West Virginia Infantry: An Embattled Union Regiment from the Civil War's Most Divided State. By David W. Mellott and Mark A. Snell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. Pp. 354.) It is not an understatement to say that David W. Mellott's and Mark A. Snell's regimental history marks a seminal turning point in West Virginia's Civil War historiography. A century-long drought existed between when the few regimental histories produced by the veterans themselves, along with Theodore Lang's admirable but imperfect Loyal West Virginia (1895), were published and the appearance of Mellott's and Snell's history. It can be argued that The Seventh West Virginia Infantry represents the first scholarly, book-length account of a West Virginia regiment ever written. The authors tap a number of primary sources compiled from military service and pension records at the National Archives, research Mellott conducted on his own family connections to the Seventh West Virginia, statistical data compiled under Snell's directorship at the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University, manuscript [End Page 78] collections, the Official Records, and contemporary newspapers such as the venerable Wheeling Intelligencer. The first two chapters, presented against the backdrop of western Virginia's separation from Virginia, largely concentrate on the regiment's recruitment, organization, and early skirmishes from 1861 until mid-1862. One of the characteristics unique to many Loyal Virginia (later West Virginia) regiments was that not only did Virginians enlist, but Ohioans from Monroe County largely made up Companies D and G, while Pennsylvanians from Greene County, filled the ranks of Companies E and F. These men, along with a fair number of immigrants, rounded out the regiment's complement. Through Mellott's and Snell's documentation of the Seventh's recruitment, they offer a tantalizing glimpse into a question that Civil War historians, to a large degree, have ignored: why did hundreds of men from Ohio and Pennsylvania willingly serve in Loyal Virginia regiments? Generally, the simple answer given is that Ohio and Pennsylvania had filled their quotas and turned these men away, but did regional identity and socioeconomic relationships play a larger role than historians have ventured to say? Mellott's and Snell's research doesn't come to any conclusions on this point, but their work does provide the foundations for further inquiry. The bulk of Mellott's and Snell's book, however, is rightfully devoted to the Seventh's esteemed combat record. Assigned early in 1862 to guard the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in western Virginia, the Seventh engaged in skirmishes with regular Confederate forces and guerillas. Subsequently, as part of General James Shields's division, the regiment fought against Stonewall Jackson's forces in the Shenandoah Valley. In July 1862, the Seventh West Virginia Infantry was permanently transferred to the Army of the Potomac. It participated in the waning stages of McClellan's failed Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Day's Battles. At the Sunken Road at Antietam, on September 17, 1862, it suffered its largest number of casualties: thirty killed in action, seven mortally wounded, and seventy-seven wounded. After Antietam, the Seventh fought in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and perhaps, its finest hour, at Cemetery Ridge on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg. The following year the Seventh fought in the battles of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and at Petersburg. Along with the rest of the Army of the Potomac, the regiment found itself at Appomattox Court House in April 1865, when General Lee's forces surrendered. By the war's end, the regiment had become the fledgling state's most storied regiment. Its participation in some of the most hard-fought battles of the war ensured that it lived up to its self-proclaimed sobriquet, The Bloody Seventh. [End Page 79] The book's epilogue discusses the Seventh West Virginia Infantry in history and memory. It focuses on the regiment's veterans and their attempt to assimilate into civilian life after...

Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott Fay A. Yarbrough Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research. By Paul D. Escott. New Directions in Southern History. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. xii, 188. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-7535-5.) Given the plethora of work published about the American Civil War, what more can be said? Paul D. Escott's Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for [End Page 171] Research offers some suggestions. Escott also surveys the historiography and concisely sketches out some of the big questions historians have wrestled with in writing about the war. The volume consists of seven chapters. Each offers an evaluation of some aspect of Civil War historiography: the origins of the war; the war and society; the effect of the war on African Americans; military history; new methodological approaches to writing about the war, particularly the use of digital tools; environmental history; and a reimagining of how historians could talk about the consequences of the war. Analyzing the causes of the Civil War is a perennial activity for historians. Rather than think of the sectional divide as turning solely on a north/south axis, Escott urges readers to consider the "middle third," consisting of the border states, as another player in the sectional crisis (p. 13). He also stakes a claim on the question of "who deserves the credit for freeing the slaves," northern white leaders or the enslaved themselves: the actions of both groups were "equally" necessary in Escott's view (p. 15). The growth of social history has produced numerous works on social relations and cultural changes during the Civil War, particularly with regard to gender. Escott asserts in his second chapter, however, that there are topics yet to be plumbed, including patterns of "internal violence" in the Confederacy, the growth and meaning of ideas of nationalism in the North, and northern racism's connection to white identity (p. 22). Escott's research suggestions for the topic of African Americans during the war years relate closely to social history. For instance, he argues for more work on black women, both elite and working-class, in the North. Other lacunae in the field include identifying the characteristics of those African Americans who favored and opposed emigration, understanding black northerners' "commitment … to the United States, despite its history of enslavement and discrimination," and tracing the growth of black ideology (p. 57). Escott acknowledges in chapter 4 his own bias toward political and social history rather than military history and turns to historians such as Gary W. Gallagher and Richard M. McMurray to identify some of the gaps in this literature. Escott explores "what constituted victory in battle"—a very basic question that lacks consensus among Civil War military historians (p. 70). Territory claimed? Fewer casualties? He also urges further study of relationships between generals and presidents and a more critical look at generals in particular. Escott asks other important questions: Did southern society, specifically Charles Roland's idea of "'localism,'" constrain Jefferson Davis's military strategy (p. 73)? How important was the West in the war? Escott encourages scholars to follow the example of Lisa Tendrich Frank and examine the role gender played in motivating particular military strategies (humiliating white southern women by entering homes and destroying property, for instance) and reactions. In his fifth chapter, Escott examines the potential benefits of digital humanities, both in terms of the sources that digitization makes available to scholars and new methodologies such as GIS mapping and data mining. He also offers some principles to guide digital humanities research that focus on cooperation and sharing of materials. Next, Escott suggests new avenues of research if scholars consider the interactions of people and the environment. [End Page 172] Yes, military historians factor geography and topography in studies of battles, but what about weather and climate? Moreover, discussions of disease do not relate just to soldiers in camp or in battle; civilians were also victims. Masses of moving troops took livestock, as well as diseases that affected livestock, with them, as did refugees. What effect did this movement have on the environment? Finally, Escott leans on the...

The Black Saturday Massacre of 1975: the discomfort of assembling the Lebanese civil war narrative

ABSTRACTThe Black Saturday massacre that took place on 6 December 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon, marked the first large-scale targeting of Lebanese civilians during the Lebanese civil war. The magnitude of the violence committed on that day set the precedent to outbursts of violence between December 1975 and June 1976, namely the Battle of the Hotels, and the Karantina and Damour massacres which were retaliatory in nature. The circumstances surrounding the massacre remain tied to one individual in particular, Joseph Sa`adeh, who initiated the massacre upon learning of the death of his son. Considering that the construction of the Lebanese civil war narrative remains one of the most politically contested and sensitive processes in Lebanon to date, this article examines where personal motivations, grievances and convictions fit in historiographical practices, which are often centred on actions themselves, and are dismissive of the vast personal negotiations that build up to them. The article therefore offers a deeper examination of Lebanese civil war historiography, by stitching together the voices of both fighters and civilians. In doing so, the article also challenges the linear trajectories of war narratives in Lebanon that lend themselves easily to epistemological labels of sectarianism, and often ignore the arbitrariness of people's behaviour in times of extreme stress.

A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South by Michael D. Robinson

Reviewed by: A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South by Michael D. Robinson Michael Green (bio) A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South. By Michael D. Robinson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Cloth, $34.95.) In 1949, early in a herculean career as a historian and political activist, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. published a controversial book with which scholars still reckon. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom sought to influence responses to the Cold War by staking out a position of liberal anticommunism. The criticisms offered a reminder of the difficulty of finding a middle ground, or anything approaching the middle, on great issues. The idea of a vital center, and the problem of being in the middle, forms the core of Michael Robinson's fine book. A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South joins a recent, welcome trend in Civil War historiography, exemplified by Christopher Phillips's The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (2016) and similarly focused studies: an attempt to come to grips with border regions and, indeed, to define just what the border was. "Although contemporary Americans understood the stakes of the Border South's secession, historians traditionally have devoted scant attention to the region as a collective entity," Robinson observes. "Hindsight provides great clarity about the final outcome of the Civil War in the Border South, but it also tends to obscure the unpredictable path that border Southerners traversed during the secession crisis" (6). By "Border South," Robinson means the four states that remained in the Union with a slave population of at least some substance: Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri. This thoroughly researched work examines in detail the political actors and actions in those states that shaped their responses to secession, and the importance of the "proslavery unionism" that Robinson describes and analyzes throughout the book. [End Page 705] The word "responses" should indeed be plural, not merely because each state had its own characteristics, but because Robinson makes clear that the trajectory of the border states varied with events. That he begins in and with Kentucky is appropriate, since Henry Clay's ghost loomed large, between the earlier efforts of "the Great Compromiser" and the pivotal roles of his old state and his aging protégé, John J. Crittenden, a veteran Bluegrass State politician who took it upon himself to don Clay's mantle and find a way to avoid secession and the dissolution of the Union. Leaders in the border slave states grasped the Union's fragility in the late 1850s, by dint of their location and their lesser dependence on the peculiar institution. Caught between lower northern states and the Upper and Lower South, border southerners realized that their region could be the battleground over the future of slavery. Their status on the border between slavery and freedom would pose risks and problems for not only their reliance on slavery along the border, but also their society and culture. Indeed, border southerners already foresaw a grave threat, as Robinson demonstrates. John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry obviously put Republicans in a bind and enraged the fire-eaters, but he shows how it proved particularly problematic in the border states, where it excited the secessionist sentiment that Crittenden and his allies had been desperately trying to ease. The era's political divisions are well known, but Robinson gives added texture to them by showing how they shaped the responses of the border states to such pivotal moments as the election of 1860, South Carolina's secession, and the coming of the war. He also digs deeper into some less studied battles, such as the contest to elect a Speaker of the House in 1859 and 1860 and how it reflected and affected border state unionism. Robinson displays a great command of the sources, including not only a variety of letters, speeches, and newspaper reports, but also several tables showing how voters and their elected officials in the four states reacted to Unionism and threats to it. He presents fascinating...

A History of American Civil War Literature ed. by Coleman Hutchison

Reviewed by: A History of American Civil War Literature ed. by Coleman Hutchison Tanfer Emin Tunç A History of American Civil War Literature. Edited by Coleman Hutchison. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 357. $89.99, ISBN 978-1-107-10972-8.) A History of American Civil War Literature is a collection of twenty-two essays, edited by Coleman Hutchison, that surveys the writing of the Civil War era and twentieth-century literary interpretations of the conflict. The volume is divided into three sections—"Contexts," "Genres," and "Figures"—covering a wide range of Civil War works and authors, from the well known to the neglected. This timely study, which comes in the wake of the 150th anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, is, as Hutchison notes in his preface, one of the "60,000 Civil War–related books or pamphlets published since 1865. That is a publication rate of a book a day, every day, since the cessation of hostilities" (p. xvii). As he conveys, a "robust publishing industry" has flourished around the war over the past century and a half, which leads one to wonder what more can actually be said about the conflict that divided, and then reunited, a nation (p. xvii). The Civil War is not only "an obsession for critics and lay readers alike" but also an endless source of research, analysis, and debate, especially as more and more scholars begin to examine the conflict through a multi-disciplinary lens (p. xvii). This volume reflects that trend by including contributions from specialists in literature, history, American studies, and southern studies. The collection compels readers to rethink what is commonly considered "literature" and to look beyond fiction into the realm of essays and life writing. Moreover, these essays also take into account "new directions in Civil War historiography and cultural studies," by emphasizing the transnational and transatlantic aspects of the war and by underscoring the [End Page 426] importance of collective and cultural memory, or "how the war has been remembered over time" (p. xviii). Another strength of this volume is its contribution to the study of southern literary production during the antebellum, wartime, and postbellum eras. Even some of the most recent investigations of Civil War literature, such as Randall Fuller's From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New York, 2011), tend to focus on northern writers, intellectuals, critics, and their works, often at the expense of southern voices. Much like Hutchison's Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (Athens, Ga., 2012), this volume seeks to fill this gap in the scholarship. A History of American Civil War Literature examines the war by considering contributions from both sides with the intention of providing a more complete picture. As Hutchison rightfully asserts, overlooking southern works on the war is detrimental on numerous levels. Such an omission suggests that these works do not exist, are not worthy of inclusion or attention, or are limited to a small group of authors. As Hutchison observes, a thorough analysis of the "literature produced in the South before, during, and after the war" is long overdue (p. xix). Those expecting a historical survey or narrative will be disappointed since, understandably, a collection of essays written by different authors cannot cover all the bases. Thus in this sense, the title of the volume—A History of American Civil War Literature—is misleading. While in each section the essays are generally arranged in chronological order of their subject matter, at best they provide only slices of American Civil War literature. However, as Hutchison remarks, this episodic organization is part of the strategy of this collection—it leaves spaces in order to encourage "readers to see connections among the individual essays and to consider issues of historical contingency, literary form, and author function" (p. xix). The first section of the collection, "Contexts," explores antebellum and postbellum texts that illuminate the coming of the war and its aftermath. This section also suggests how these two eras have generally contributed to our understanding of the conflict. Highlights include essays on secessionist and abolitionist print cultures, the northern and southern publishing industries, and...

Anarchism and the countryside: Old and new stumbling blocks in the study of rural collectivization during the Spanish Civil War

Abstract This article analyses the factors that have led to what in my opinion amounts to the marginalization of rural collectivization in Spanish Civil War historiography. The uniqueness of this process has added weight to the notion of exceptionalism typically attached to studies of the rural world, modern Spain, anarchism, and the Spanish Civil War. As a consequence, analyses of this phenomenon have tended to lack both complexity and a sufficient appreciation of context.

O zgodovinopisju o španski državljanski vojni

ON HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WARThe author discusses the main trends in the research of Spanish civil war since early 1960s, when the first critical distance-based analyses were carried out by British, American, French and Spanish researchers. The paper reflects on works and interpretations by Hugh Thomas, Paul Preston, Stanley Peyne, Gabriel Jackson, Pierre Broué and Émile Témime, while briefly mentioning the books and views of Burnett Bolloten, Walther Bernecker, Ronald Radosh, Herbert Southworth, Helen Graham, E.H. Carr and Noam Chomsky. Furthermore, the author presents the development of the Spanish civil war historiography in Spain after Franco’s death, focusing mostly on works and assessments by Ángel Martin Viñas, Santos D. Juliá, Albert Reig Tapia, and Enrique Moradiellos.

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston

Reviewed by: The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston Adam W. Dean The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 345. $47.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-5918-7.) James L. Huston’s most recent work is an excellent study that addresses a similar topic as my own book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery [End Page 933] Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2015). Together, both works evidence a historiographical turn emphasizing the importance of the northern family farm in shaping Civil War politics. Huston’s witty and iconoclastic writing style, earlier on display in Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003) and in a political biography of Stephen A. Douglas, is engaging and refreshing. The argument is convincing, rigorously documented, and overdue in Civil War historiography. In the last decade, both Huston and I put our fingers on a problem in the study of nineteenth-century America. The explosion of industry and corporate America after the American Civil War had seduced historians to look at the past with this future in mind. Ever since Charles A. and Mary R. Beard advanced the notion, scholars have wanted to believe that the war pitted an agrarian South against an emerging industrial juggernaut. Even the main philosophy associated with the Republican Party of the 1850s—free labor—has been interpreted as an urban ideology. Yet such claims run into some intractable problems. As Huston pointedly notes, “What connection did [Abraham] Lincoln have with urban industrialization? Answer: none” (p. 188). A bigger problem with the Beard thesis and its derivatives is “that some 70 percent of the northern population” was engaged in small farming (p. 77). The reality of northern landownership suggests a much different picture of Civil War politics than has been told. The Union that went to war in 1861 was a nation of small farmers, owning or seeking to acquire 80 to 120 acres of land. These landownership patterns created an egalitarian ethos that prized manual labor and the ability of the poor to rise in material prosperity. The Confederacy represented large plantations where a “slaveholding elite presid[ed] over an impoverished mass of slaves and whites” (p. 223). These landownership regimes came into conflict during westward territorial expansion, instigating the war. The origins of Huston’s story begin in Great Britain and the English Civil War. New England Puritans, supporters of the parliamentary side, identified land distribution patterns as the key flaw in English society during the seventeenth century. Concentrated landholdings created a leisure class that mocked manual labor and ran roughshod over those deemed inferior in social standing. The English yeomanry struggled to gain freedom from wealthy landlords and from tenancy. Thus, in the colonies, New Englanders enacted land policies that promoted smallholders. In the American South, however, the landed gentry proved victorious. Huston theorizes that large plantations derived economic advantages over smaller enterprises from “specialization of labor, economies of scale, and [the] ability to allocate labor as needed” (p. 168). Yet he ultimately maintains that planters decided to engage in slave agriculture because they wanted the lifestyle of the British gentry. By contrast, Huston marvels at the small towns and regional cities of the rural North. Smaller farms required hard work and mutual dependence. Free men and women engaged in “bending, lifting, hoeing, shoveling, mending, and stitching . . . all done by hand and with primitive tools” (p. 116). In return for this labor, as Huston shows, farmworkers were able to save their wages [End Page 934] and purchase their own land, acquiring economic independence and prosperity. They also lived where they could trade with others for goods not produced on the farm. Thus, unlike An Agrarian Republic, Huston places the origins of landownership differences squarely on human choice and British customs, not soil or climate. This is an important and needed revision of my work. While Huston would not be so crass...

Reimagining the Civil War

Reimagining the Civil War Yael a. Sternhell (bio) Brian Allen Drake, ed. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. vi + 250 pp. Notes and index. $22.95 Mark M. Smith. The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xii + 197 pp. Illustrations, maps, note on sources, notes, and index. $27.95 Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and Ari Kelman. Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. 224 pp. Illustrations, notes, and suggested reading. $26.00. For most Americans, the Civil War sesquicentennial has come and gone with little fanfare. Ceremonies have been small, controversies have been sparse, and no memorable speeches have been delivered. Yet in Civil War historiography, the last few years have been a time of monumental change. A field that used to be known mostly for military studies is now a hotbed of new methods, approaches, and frames. Social and cultural histories have moved from the margins into the center, accompanied by smaller subfields such as environmental history, budding trends like a spatial turn, a shifting focus to the trans-Mississippi West, and a growing attentiveness to the multivalent functions of the human body in wartime. What many of these new directions share is a deep interest in the material dimensions of war. Whereas questions of ideology and causality remain important, historians are increasingly preoccupied with the war as a physical experience, a process shaped not so much by the politics underlying it but by the interactions between the conditions it created and the men and women who had to contend with them. Three of the more intriguing books to have come out during the sesquicentennial showcase this perspective in powerful ways. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green is an excellent collection reflecting the growth of the field and its influence. The best essays in the book offer truly innovative interpretations of how the environment shaped the history of the war. Kenneth Noe paints with large brushstrokes the overall picture of climate [End Page 581] patterns during the war period, most crucially the alteration of heavy rains and droughts in the South. These unusual weather events, he argues, played a crucial and unacknowledged role in facilitating Confederate defeat. Yet he also urges historians to “move beyond the effects of the elements to the question of how people and institutions shaped their responses to them” (p. 25). The Confederate cause, Noe makes clear, was a casualty not just of bad weather, but of the government’s inability to deal with the consequences of agricultural disasters that ensued. Megan Kate Nelson explores one episode of military conflict in the oftforgotten Southwestern theatre, the embarrassing Union surrender at San Augustine Springs, New Mexico. By carefully reconstructing both environmental conditions and human behavior, she delivers a new history of the engagement and argues that Union defeat was not the result of incompetence but of heatstroke and dehydration that caused the officer in charge to make grave mistakes in judgment and that forced his soldiers to withdraw from the march. In another noteworthy essay, John Inscoe offers a captivating interpretation of the Appalachian wilderness as both myth and reality. The unique topography, terrain, and environment of Appalachia shaped both the nature of the wartime struggle and the way it was perceived. “The war drove perceptions of the mountain South as moral high ground, and made of it both a literal, psychological, and emotional refuge from a world gone terribly wrong” (p. 131). And yet the paradox Inscoe points out is that the region’s allure as a hiding place made it highly attractive for a diverse and unruly crowd of runaways: refugees from combat zones, escaping slaves, Confederate deserters, Union POWs, and guerilla fighters of all sorts. These groups wreaked havoc on the region and generated a type of irregular warfare that was often more brutal than the one employed in regular battlefields. In a different vein, Lisa Brady attempts to bridge the gap between environmental and military historians by introducing the term “friction,” coined by the nineteenth...