Regimental Histories Research Articles

Colonel Jan Breytenbach – Military Historian or Storyteller? An Analysis of Breytenbach’s Work using a Military History Conceptual Framework

Books on the South African Border War have flooded the popular market in the last two decades. Historians, journalists, and particularly ex-soldiers – often amateur writers – have tapped into the market. The genres of books include, but are not limited to, personal accounts, autobiographies, regimental histories, journalist accounts, and academic books. Jan Breytenbach was one of the first South African Defence Force officers to write about the Border War. He published seven books, and paved the way for many writers to follow in his footsteps. Most of his books focus on the history of 32 Battalion. Against this background, the study on which this article is based, aimed to analyse Breytenbach’s writing using a conceptual framework put forward by military historians.

Воспоминания подполковника К. Н. Игнатьева о службе в 12-м пехотном Сибирском Барнаульском полку. 1910 г.

This work is devoted to the analysis of regimental histories as one of the tools for the formation of historical memory in the military environment. Active work on creating histories of military formations was carried out at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, which was associated with reforms in the army in the last quarter of the 19th century, as well as a series of regimental anniversaries. This genre of military historical literature contains rich information not only about wars, but also about the peculiarities of regimental life. For the first time, the memoirs of Lieutenant Colonel K.N. Ignat’ev about his service in the 12th Siberian Barnaul Infantry Regiment are published, deposited in Fund 339 - Russian Military Historical Society of the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RGVIA). The analytical part of the article analyzes the heuristic potential of the source, characterizes its structure, style and content. In the memoirs of K.N. Ignat’ev contains information about some regimental traditions, personal characteristics of commanders and colleagues. The source contains references to the names of officers, information about which is being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. To identify the information about the mentioned military personnel of the regiment, lists of officers by seniority of the imperial army of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries were used. Based on contextual-historical analysis, it was determined that the time of creation of the memories of K.N. Ignat’ev coincides with active work on creating an essay about the 12th Siberian Barnaul Infantry Regiment, compiled by military historiographer, member of the Imperial Russian Military Historical Society (IRVIO) M.K. Sokolovskii. Historical and comparative analysis made it possible to establish that the lieutenant colonel’s memories were not used by M.K. Sokolovskii while working on regimental history. The compiler's attention is focused on recreating the life of the regiment during the Russo-Japanese War. The author comes to the conclusion that in order to form the identity of a military corporation, regimental histories focused on military events and heroic deeds of the military formation. However, analysis of the memories of K.N. Ignat’ev made it possible to establish that in local commands and battalions with less combat experience, they sought to preserve the memory of commanders and regimental traditions. The published document allows us to significantly supplement our knowledge about the history of the Barnaul regiment, as well as about the peculiarities of relationships within the military corporation. At the same time, analysis of the content of the source and the context of its appearance reveals some features of the process of compiling regimental histories.

The ‘Nation in Arms’, ‘Attempted Rearmament’ and the ‘Brigade of Guards’, 1936–1939

This article is an enquiry into the voluntary and part-time nature, as well as the Britishness, of the Canadian militia, especially the Non-Permanent Active Militia (NPAM), in an interwar ‘nation-in-arms’. Major-General Maurice Pope’s insights are revisited through the eyes of regimental histories, print media, memoirs and other sources. After reviewing the role of voluntarism, unpaid service and improved training, three themes will be considered. The first is a type of training known as close-order drill, singled out by Joseph Pope as a mark of English-speaking regimental culture. The creation in 1937 of a Canadian Guards brigade, part of a wider Guards tradition across the British World, ties into a second theme briefly considered: NPAM participation in the royal tour of 1939 in communities across Canada, which merits a more detailed study. Third, there follows a case study of one exemplary but lesser-known interwar officer in Ottawa, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lisle of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, who, like so many men across the country, as well as his civilian day-job, pursued a lifelong part-time army career as a reserve unit officer and realist contributor to the Canadian Defence Quarterly.

Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France

We measure how a network of heroes can legitimize and diffuse extreme political behaviors. We exploit newly declassified intelligence files, novel voting data, and regimental histories to show that home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily rotated under Philippe Pétain’s generalship through the heroic World War I battlefield of Verdun diverge politically thereafter, particularly following Pétain’s own overt espousal of authoritarian views. Further, under Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime (1940–1944), they raise 7 percent more active Nazi collaborators per capita. These effects extend across all forms of Nazi collaboration and diffuse beyond the veterans themselves. (JEL D72, D74, N34, N44, Z13)

Честен и храбр. Генерал от кавалерии барон Отто Вильгельм Христофор (Иван Христофорович) фон Дерфельден (часть 2)

This article presents the biography of a hero of the Russo-Turkish wars of the second half of the 18th century, the Italian and Swiss campaigns of 1799, and the associate of Generalissimo A.V. Suvorov - General of Cavalry Baron Otto Wilhelm Christofor von Derfelden. The biography is based on the analysis of previously published documents, reference books, regimental histories, scientific monographs, and articles.

Soldier Theaters in the Russian Army

The distraction of the population from drunkenness and from deviant forms of spending free time in general was not only an urgent socio-cultural issue, but also an important state and social task in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries. One of the ways to solve this problem in the Russian army was the creation of soldier theaters in military units. On the basis of a wide range of pre-revolutionary sources, the article for the first time presents the history of the theaters creation and development. There are revealed the main purposes of the soldier theaters in the Russian army: 1) to distract from drunkenness and other forms of deviant behavior; 2) to promote the moral education of lower ranks; 3) to provide them with an alternative option for leisure — pleasant and useful. The article presents the main results of studying the book catalogs of soldiers’ libraries in order to identify in them special sections dedicated to theater publications, which allow reconstructing the potential repertoire of the soldier theaters, and when analyzing regimental histories — the real one. The article reveals the role of officers in setting up and functioning of the theaters. There is presented the experience of organizing the theaters for lower ranks in the German army of the same period, purposefully studied by official Russian agents for use in the Russian army. The conducted research made it possible to clarify the tasks of creating the soldier theaters, their repertoire and features of functioning. The revealed positive experience of conducting useful and pleasant leisure in the form of setting up soldier theaters can be useful today in organizing free time for both servicemen of the Russian army and the civilian population of the country.

Schnappschüsse der Befreiung: Fotografien amerikanischer Soldaten im Frühjahr 1945 by Peter Pirker and Matthias Breit

Reviewed by: Schnappschüsse der Befreiung: Fotografien amerikanischer Soldaten im Frühjahr 1945 by Peter Pirker and Matthias Breit Jeffrey Luppes Peter Pirker and Matthias Breit, Schnappschüsse der Befreiung: Fotografien amerikanischer Soldaten im Frühjahr 1945. Innsbruck: Tyrolia Verlag, 2020. 303 pp. After fighting their way across France and Germany during the fall and winter of 1944, the members of the 103rd Infantry ("Cactus") Division of the United States Army found themselves in western Austria in the weeks immediately before and after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender in the spring of 1945. This relatively unscathed alpine region in which the Cactus Division was positioned at war's end was both symbolically significant and strategically important: in 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met there at the Brenner Pass to forge their "Pact of Steel"; it was also there that the Western European front linked up with the Italian front as members of the Cactus Division joined arms with the American fighting forces coming from the south. The 103rd Infantry Division's war and its immediate aftermath were anything but uneventful, and fortunately, its soldiers documented their experiences—including combat, the surrender of Wehrmacht soldiers, the liberation of concentration camps, encounters with forced laborers and displaced persons, arrests of high-profile Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring and Wernher von Braun, and the occupation of this part of Austria—with a great many photographs. The photos of the Cactus Division are the subject of a new study by Austrian historian Peter Pirker and graphic designer Matthias Breit. According to Pirker and Breit, the photos—both official photographs by noted members of the US Signal Corps as well as unofficial and hitherto unpublished snapshots by untrained soldiers, some of whom requisitioned their cameras while fighting in Europe—provide insights into the liberation of Tyrol from the perspective of American soldiers, not the most common perspective on this topic. Moreover, they contend that the photos under [End Page 128] analysis offer to some extent counter-images ("Gegenbilder") to the canonized and symbolically important images, far better known, that tend to paint the local populations in a more favorable light. Indeed, the authors argue, the photos of American soldiers make a significant contribution to Austrian cultural memory by dispelling widespread myths around the defeat of National Socialism and restoration of peace in Austria (23). With a firm focus on shedding light on Austrian memory culture, Pirker and Breit's book is actually more about the American soldiers and their behavior in Austria than about Austrians and their perceptions of their postwar occupiers. Their approach is innovative and, ultimately, successful. The authors selected the objects of their analysis from the photographic archives of the US Signal Corps as well as the large collection assembled by the volunteer-run 103rd Infantry Division Association housed today at the University of Southern Mississippi. While the official photos of the Signal Corps were generally of higher quality, their motifs—as Pirker and Breit point out—were more consistent and predictable, essentially rendering them less interesting. In most cases, including in some images of actual combat, which were far less common in the snapshots taken by regular soldiers, the purpose of the photos was to make clear to all who the "good guys" and "bad guys" were in the war and to legitimize the Allied occupation. For that reason, the authors of this captivating new study consider the more mundane photos of the everyday soldiers, who were crazy about taking pictures ("geradezu versessen aufs Fotografieren," 11), to be more illuminating. A particular strength of the book is the authors' use of additional resources, such as biographies of the soldier photographers, servicemen's letters to relatives back home, regimental histories, and local newspaper articles about the soldiers' experiences to provide further context for the photographs. The unofficial photos are notable to Pirker and Breit for what they do not reveal: images of casualties and scenes of combat; fraternization with Austrian women; contacts with local populations; and African American soldiers, to name a few examples. Instead, the bulk of the informal photos show the soldiers' now-peaceful everyday lives in this beautiful setting: homesick comrades and friends behaving like tourists on...

Военно-полковая историография участия кубанского казачества в событиях завершающего этапа Кавказской войны (1861-1864 гг.)

The paper aims to systematise and analyse regimental histories of military formations of the Kuban Cossack Host at the final stage of the Caucasian War, to identify the reasons for their compilation and writing, to determine their significance in the scientific search of modern scholars. The research is novel in that it is the first in Russian historiography to summarise and analyse works written by pre-revolutionary and modern authors on the military historical topics regarding the second largest irregular military formation of the Russian Empire, the Kuban Cossack Host. The paper raises unresolved questions related to the lack of necessary sources on individual Cossack formations that took an active part in the armed confrontation with mountain peoples. As a result, it has been concluded that the identified historiographical materials about the events of the Caucasian War, expanding and supplementing knowledge about the history of the Kuban Cossacks and the Imperial Russian Army in 1861-1864, are the most important sources for the study of Russia’s military history and deserve close attention from scholars.

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 Mark Grimsley New Perspectives on the Union War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8232-8453-5. 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. Most Northerners understood the Civil War as a conflict to preserve the Union. However, as this superior collection of essays maintains, they differed as to how to define the Union cause. Lincoln and his supporters, for example, saw emancipation primarily as a means to win the war. Critics on his political left saw the destruction of slavery as an end in itself. Moderates viewed the war as a contest against the Southern Slave Power and focused mainly on a quest for policies that would restore the Union on the loyal states' terms. Conservatives opposed both emancipation and the Lincoln administration's expansion of central government authority. They puzzled over how to support the Union government while opposing the president. Each of the eight essays in this collection explores one or more of these competing camps, and most do so through the lens of biography. Frank Cirillo uses an ardently antislavery couple, Stephen and Abby Foster, to make a fresh exploration of abolitionists who rejected a Union war as morally bankrupt—the Union, after all, had upheld slavery for its entire existence—and insisted upon a war for the complete liberation of enslaved Americans, full stop. Tamika Nunley examines the wartime career of Elizabeth Keckly, known primarily as Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress but also a skillful activist on behalf of black refugees and soldiers. Jack Furniss looks at New York politician Horatio Seymour, who attempted with much success to establish a moderate Democratic position of a loyal opposition that supported the Union war while being critical of the conduct of the war, as well as the machinations of the Radical Republicans. Will Kurtz examines the ways John Hughes, the Irish American archbishop of New York, and Patrick Donahoe, a prominent newspaper publisher, pointed to the valor of Union Catholic soldiers as a compelling argument against anti-Catholic nativism, while at the same time advancing a conservative vision that rejected the elision of a purely Union war into one that included the destruction of slavery. [End Page 316] Jesse George-Nichol assesses Attorney General Edward Bates, a former Whig from Missouri who waged a determined but ultimately losing battle to prevent the Lincoln administration from moving too far in its embrace of emancipation and in its willingness to wage a destructive war against the Confederacy. D. H. Dilbeck examines the German American jurist Francis Lieber's conviction that a successful Union war had to be a just war—a conviction that led him to prepare the rules of war now known as the Lieber Code. Michael Caires focuses on Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who presided over a fiscal revolution that centralized the Northern banking system in a successful bid to underwrite the immense expense of the Union war effort. The essay by Peter Luebke is the only one that departs from using a biographical lens. It examines dozens of postwar regimental histories to gain insight into the meanings that Union veterans assigned to their service in the salvation of the Republic. In their introduction to the volume, Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon argue that "taken together, these essays show a concept of 'Union' capacious enough to include a wide range of political agendas" (6). Loyal Americans nonetheless held in common three core convictions: that "affection rather than coercion should hold the Union together," that disunionism was "a lethal and highly contagious disease," and that slavery had to be removed "as the principal source of division—whether by compromise, reform, or revolution" (6–7). Gallagher and Varon are senior scholars with major reputations. The contributors, however, are without exception at the start of their careers (and closely connected to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia). To be sure, three contributors have books either published or forthcoming, and one has edited a new edition of a regimental history originally published in 1896...

Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Combat Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France

We measure the effects of a network of heroes in legitimizing and diffusing extreme political behaviors. Exploiting newly-declassified intelligence files, novel voting data and regimental histories, we show the home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily rotated through Philippe Petain's command during the heroic WWI battle of Verdun, though similar before WWI, increasingly espouse Petain's authoritarian political views thereafter, raising 7% more active Nazi collaborators per capita during the Petain-led Vichy regime (1940-44). The effects are similar across joining Fascist parties, German forces, paramilitaries hunting Jews and the Resistance, and collaborating economically.

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 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...

Сражение у Прейсиш-Эйлау: судьба трофейных французских знамен 1807 г.

The article presents results of the study of the fate of Napoleon’s army flags taken by Russian troops in the bloody battle of Preussisch-Eylau on January 26-27, 1807. These trophies were considered especially valuable in the Russian Empire. As the eternal symbol of the glory of the Russian arms, they were placed in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on February 3, 1807. However, from October 1812 they were thought to have been transferred to an unknown location and fate. Lack of reliable information, confirmed by archival documents, gave birth to several unreasonable inferences and hypotheses. Although the very possibility of a complete disappearance of valuable trophies is dubious, the issue has remained unstudied. The article is to establish the fate of the trophy flags. The study of scholarship on the Russian Imperial army, memories of the participants in the battle and regimental histories allow to establish the circumstances of the French flags capture and their exact number, while Kammerfurier journals provide information on their delivery to the cathedral. Documents found in the archives have illuminated the fate that befell these flags. Contrary to conventional belief, six trophy flags were brought to the capital with an escort of two platoons of the Horse Guards Regiment. It has been established that the Preussisch-Eylau trophies had not been transferred from the Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1812, but remained there until October 1906. As careful preservation and restoration was then needed, they were transferred to the Museum of Artillery History for temporary storage, until the Military History Museum was built. In March 1918, together with other museum valuables, they were evacuated to Yaroslavl, where four were burned during the suppression of the White Guard uprising. The vestiges of the remaining two were transferred to the State Hermitage Museum in 1948.

A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery by Justin Martin

Reviewed by: A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery by Justin Martin David Work A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery. By Justin Martin. ( New York: Da Capo Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 318. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-306-82525-5.) Justin Martin's new book on the battle of Antietam argues that this desperate, savage battle of September 1862 was the most critical engagement of the Civil War. Not only did the Union victory end General Robert E. Lee's [End Page 704] attempt to invade Maryland and win the war for the Confederacy, but also the victory provided President Abraham Lincoln with the opportunity to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and allowed the Republicans, despite losing seats, to retain control of Congress after the 1862 midterm elections. Thus the battle transformed the Civil War and saved Lincoln's presidency. There is nothing original in Martin's interpretation of the importance of the battle of Antietam, as previous authors have made similar arguments. What sets Martin's work apart is its discussion of a wide range of topics that do not always get much attention in books focused on a single battle. These topics include the actions of Clara Barton, who first rendered frontline aid to soldiers at Antietam; Union doctor Jonathan Letterman, who devised innovative methods for caring for the wounded that were first used at Antietam; and photographer Alexander Gardner, whose famous photographs of the dead of Antietam changed the way people viewed war. Martin gives a great deal of attention to Lincoln, describing his first year in the presidency (including a detailed discussion of the death of his son Willie), his decision to write the Emancipation Proclamation, and his movements on the day of the battle and immediately afterward. Martin provides an excellent summary of the engagement that captures the human drama of the battle, while not getting bogged down in too much detail, but he gives very little space to the Maryland campaign as a whole. His focus is on the battle of Antietam. A Fierce Glory: Antietam—The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery is well researched and sourced, making use of numerous primary and secondary sources, including official records, newspapers, regimental histories, and autobiographies. The book does not follow a strictly chronological narrative, as the first few chapters alternate between the engagement itself and details of the first year of the war, biographies of Lincoln, Lee, and George B. McClellan, and the movement of the armies before Antietam. So, for example, while the battle starts on page 38, the famous "lost order" occurs on page 76. For the most part this organization works, but there could have been better descriptions of the armies' movements and the command decisions made in the days leading up to the battle. Overall, Martin's book is a well-written, engaging work that, while shedding little new light on the battle itself, succeeds in widening the scope of the story of Antietam, providing readers with a narrative that is not obsessed with the movement of regiments and discusses topics not normally encountered in such a book. David Work Green River College Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Wir-Gefühle, Feindbilder und Feindseligkeit bei deutschsprachigen k.u.k. Soldaten im Ersten Weltkrieg. Eine emotionssoziologische Perspektive

This paper deals with the We-feelings, the Images of Enemies, and the Hostility of German-speaking k.u.k. soldiers serving during the First World War. Against the background of Elias!s figurational approach and in a sociology of emotions! perspective, my analysis is focused on affectual ties within military units and stresses the important role of different power balances (vertical loyalty) in regard to We-feelings and images of friends and enemies. In addition, group norms and group constraints – that influence wether the issue of We-feelings is broached or not – are rudimentary illustrated by using different sources: regimental histories, autobiographic manuscripts and diaries. These sources, as the paper shows, give a lively picture of a process from their initial enthusiasm to their growing alienation as a result of technicization and de-personalization and, finally, to their experiencing the war as either a natural, lawful necessity or, in contrast, as a pointless, meaningless struggle. The paper will particulary discuss the following questions: Which emotions are constitutive for We-Feelings and for Hostility at the front? What was the importance of emotions such as shame, sympathy, compassion and revenge regarding the bond of affection between soldiers of the Habsburg Army during World War I? Which role did „comradeship” play during attacks, particulary in regard to the escalation of violence at the front? And, how did the war shape the image of “the enemy”?

Deneys Reitz and the First World War: An Introduction to the Department of Defence Archival Holdings

The historical sources detailing South Africa’s participation in the First World War are vast, and range from official publications to regimental histories, private diaries and first-hand accounts. The Department of Defence (DOD) Documentation Centre is the custodian of all military archival material generated since the inception of the Department on 1 July 1912. Nonetheless, the material in the repository remains underutilised, despite the number of researchers who have worked or those who are now working on the military history of the Union Defence Force (UDF) during the Afrikaner Rebellion, as well as the campaigns fought in German South West Africa (GSWA), German East Africa (GEA), the Middle East and Europe. The centennial commemoration of the First World War gave rise to an increase in both professional and amateur military historical research, and a resurgence in First World War studies globally. A large number of researchers are expected to consult the First World War material at the Documentation Centre. An increase in interest in a variety of themes relating to South Africa and South African participation in the war is already detected. This article reports on a review of the Documentation Centre’s First World War holdings in relation to South Africa’s participation in the war by using Deneys Reitz, of Commando fame as a lens to illustrate the range of information available to researchers.

Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891 by Brian Christopher Thompson

Reviewed by: Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891 by Brian Christopher Thompson Dominique Bourassa Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891. By Brian Christopher Thompson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. [xxviii, 522 p., ISBN 9780773545557. CAD$49.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index, maps, portraits, figures, catalog of compositions. Since the publication of Eugène Lapierre's landmark biography, Calixa Lavallée, musicien national du Canada (Albums canadiens ([Montréal: Éditions Albert Lévesque, 1936]), many myths, misconceptions, and gaps in knowledge about the composer of the music for Canada's national anthem, "O Canada!," have endured. Brian Christopher Thompson's Anthems and Minstrel Shows: The Life and Times of Calixa Lavallée, 1842–1891 is therefore a much-needed contribution to the inadequate literature on Lavallée, presenting the first thorough account of his life "as a composer, instrumentalist, conductor, administrator, educator, and critic" (p. xxiii). Thompson's biography follows Lavallée's trail chronologically, using a wide array of primary and secondary sources (newspapers and periodicals, letters, memoirs, regimental histories, etc.). It explores Lavallée's life and work with regard to "the place of nationalism in music, or the effect of nationalism on music" (p. xxvii). Of particular interest are sections discussing Lavallée's life outside of Canada, about which little was known. Despite being considered Canada's "national musician" (p. xxii), Lavallée spent only seven years of his career in his native land as opposed to twenty-one in the United States (p. 317). Thompson's book is divided into a prologue, three parts, and an epilogue. The prologue sets the scene by retelling the pomp and circumstance surrounding the repatriation of Lavallée's remains from Massachusetts to Montreal's Côtes-des-Neiges cemetery in 1933. As Thompson remarks, this was "an exercise in nation building that was without precedent in Canada" (p. xx). The first part, "On the Road, 1842–1873" (chapters 1–3), focuses on Lavallée's childhood and his early professional career in Montreal and the United States. Born December 28, 1842, in Verchères, Québec, Lavallée moved to Montreal in 1855 to continue his musical education. In fall 1859, he became a musician in Charles Duprez's New Orleans Minstrels, "blackening his face each night" (p. xx). During the Civil War, he enrolled as a military band musician in the Fourth Rhode Island Regiment. He wrote "several war-related compositions" (p. 30), among which was The War Fever, grand galop charactéristique, op. 4. Two years later, Lavallée returned to Montreal where he taught, performed, conducted [End Page 106] the Montreal City Band, arranged national airs, and composed (chapter 2). He participated actively in politics, in part through publication in the anti-Confederation newspaper L'Union nationale. (Anti-Confederates opposed uniting the British colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into the self-governing Dominion of Canada. Instead, they supported independence or annexation of Lower Canada [today the province of Québec] to the United States.) From 1866 to 1873, Lavallée returned to the minstrel show circuit, travelling widely throughout North America with the New Orleans Minstrels, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the Morris Brothers' Minstrels (chapter 3). Since "few detailed studies of individual minstrel show performers have been published and none have been written about the musicians who made their careers in blackface," Lavallée's "experience in minstrelsy provides an extraordinary window into what was the most popular form of entertainment in the 1850s and 1860s" (p. xxv). Between 1873 and 1875, Lavallée studied piano in Paris with Antoine Marmontel and composition with François Bazio and Adrien Louis Victor Boiëldieu (chapter 4). By the time he returned to Montreal in July 1875, Lavallée was a transformed artist. No longer a popular entertainer, he would from now on devote his life to the cause of classical music through his teaching, performances, and large-scale stage productions of Charles Gounod's Jeanne d'Arc and Boiëldieu's La Dame blanche. In 1878, he moved to Québec to...

“Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey

Reviewed by: “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey John D. Fowler “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865. By M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016. Pp. [xx], 503. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-544-0.) Since the Civil War ended, countless regimental studies have been published. The earliest were often sentimental reminiscences written by the members of a particular regiment. Later regimental studies were written by the descendants of those in the regiment or by antiquarians from the communities that produced the regiments. Finally, in the late twentieth century, professional historians began to research and write the stories of regiments. Using a wide variety of primary sources, especially census records and compiled service records, these scholars have been able to draw accurate conclusions about the individual soldiers who made up Civil War armies. By using quantitative analysis, they could use their data to compare units across states and regions. While regimental histories have something to offer students of the Civil War, it is these modern studies that have the most to offer. “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey is a mixture of the old and the new. Cathey and Waddey are descendants of men from the regiment. Their work contains a wealth of primary resources and recounts the wartime story of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, composed of men from five counties in Middle Tennessee. The unit had an interesting combat history, participating in the major campaigns and battles of the western theater. As it stands, “Forward My Brave Boys!” is a well-researched wartime account of the regiment. The authors have written a fine history for those who want to know what the Eleventh Tennessee did during the Civil War. Yet the authors have produced a rather old-fashioned account in that it fails to place the regiment into any proper perspective. Absent is a meticulous search of the records that could have told us more about these men in the pre– and post–Civil War worlds. The men of the Eleventh Tennessee, [End Page 184] like all Civil War soldiers, were products of their communities, and the Civil War was only one part, albeit perhaps the defining part, of their lives. Focusing merely on the war years turns these soldiers into one-dimensional individuals. By examining community records, census records, newspapers, letters, diaries, and pension records for the soldiers and their families, the authors could have made the men themselves and not just their wartime service the focus. Moreover, through an exploration of their medical histories, prisoner of war experiences, and desertion incidents, a clear picture of the “real war” would emerge. The statistics that could be generated would allow the men to be placed in their proper context and would allow comparison with the men of other regiments. An examination of the records mentioned could also answer a number of questions useful to modern scholars. Did the men come from basically the same districts in their respective counties? How wealthy were the officers compared with the enlisted men? How old were the men on average? How large were their farms? What crops did they grow? How many came from urban areas? How did the men do economically after the war? How many were slaveholders? The answers to these questions and others would allow for patterns to be detected, and these patterns could be used to understand the world from which these men came. Cathey and Waddey’s work is well written and contains a wealth of primary sources, but not enough. Moreover, they did not extract enough information from the sources they did use. If one is interested in the wartime exploits of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, this is an excellent book. Indeed, it is better than most regimental accounts. However, the work falls far short of the type of regimental history that modern scholars produce. The extra effort...

Illinois Germans and the Coming of the Civil War: Reshaping Ethnic Identity

A HORRIBLE WAR HAS BROKEN OUT between North and South America, Albert Augustin wrote to his brother-in-law and siblings living in the tiny German state of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.1 Augustin had immigrated to the United States four years earlier in 1857. At the time he wrote his letter in August 1861, he ran a saloon in Champaign, Illinois with his wife, Louise. He began his letter by warning his relatives of the hardships of emigration. First, you lose your homeland, second you can't speak the language, and then you come to a new country where even the most educated German is like a child in terms of the language and customs. ... It takes years to figure out all the tricks and traps in America.2 But Augustin's largest concern in 1861 was war. Written less than a year after the American Civil War began, Albert Augustin's letter expressed concern that Champaign might be overrun. He told of troop numbers and of the large numbers of German officers in the Union army. He also asked his family to help his wife leave America if he should go to war and be killed. Yet Augustin's letter was also confident in the convictions of the people of the United States. Every single citizen in America is willing to give his last drop of blood for he wrote.' Then the saloonkeeper explained the reason for the American war to his family.Like most German Americans, Augustin viewed the causes of the Civil War in very specific terms. The letterhead on which he chose to write his relatives had a picture of the American flag and a large cannon with the motto Death to Traitors embossed beneath. Augustin thoughtfully translated the motto into German to read, Death to the slave traders.4 The war, of course, was all about slavery for Augustin. This became evident throughout the letter. He exclaimed in the middle of the correspondence, Death and eternal damnation to the slave traders!5 Augustin then explained the pitiful and degrading conditions of slavery to his family. He finished this section of his letter by writing, Long live America's freedom, and may the slave traders be damned. From Augustin's perspective, the American Civil War was a war of freedom against oppression. This was a common view among German Americans in the early 1860s and it motivated thousands of the foreign born and their American children to join the Union army.Statistician Benjamin Gould attempted to establish the nativity of Union soldiers in 1869. Of the 2.5 million soldiers that had served, Gould was able to establish the birth country of approximately one half in his survey. According to his figures, German-born citizens totaled 176,817 of the 1.2 million soldiers that had recorded their place of birth.6 Historian Don Tolzmann recently estimated the number of German-born soldiers in the Union army to be approximately 216,000, and those citizens of German American origin may have added as many as 500,000 to that number.7 Using Gould's more conservative estimate, more German Americans served in the Union army than any other foreign-born element.8Scholarly work on German American participation during the American Civil War is relatively sparse compared to the broader range of Civil War studies. Part of the difficulty that historians have addressing the subject area can be attributed to the language barrier. German-language newspapers, regimental histories, diaries, and letters all hold unexplored questions about ethnic identity and immigrant participation. Many letters sent to relatives and friends by German American soldiers were mailed to the various German states during the war, adding a second complication for historians. The earliest histories concerning German American participation were also in the German language written exclusively for German and German American audiences.9 Only one history of an allGerman Illinois regiment, the Twenty-Fourth Illinois Infantry, appeared after the war. Originally written in German in 1864 by William Wagner, the regiment's surgeon, the history of the Old Hecker Regiment was translated into English to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary in 1911 of the unit's formation. …

Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris

Reviewed by: Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans by M. Keith Harris Stuart McConnell (bio) Across the Bloody Chasm: The Culture of Commemoration among Civil War Veterans. By M. Keith Harris. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. Pp. 232. Cloth, $42.50.) Memories of the Civil War among the men who fought it were exceedingly complex, ranging from the reconciliationism of blue-gray reunions, through paeans to the foe’s valor (often in pointed contrast to shirking civilians), to continued denunciation of treason on the one hand and federal tyranny on the other. It was not unusual for individual veterans to combine many strands of memory, arguing that former enemies were manly warriors and fellow Americans but also that “we were right, immortally right and . . . the conqueror was wrong, eternally wrong,” as Confederate veteran Bradley T. Johnson put it in 1895 (74). Recent scholarship, led by David Blight’s magisterial Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), has emphasized the dominance of reconciliationism and the way that it helped whites to forget both the antislavery cause and the ongoing violence in the postwar South. M. Keith Harris emphasizes a contrary strain of memory, arguing that Civil War combatants refused to abandon their respective causes for many years after the war. Union veterans continued to insist that the Confederates had been traitors and, contra the recent scholarly emphasis on reconciliation, that the war had been fought (in the words of Union veteran Le Grand B. Cannon) “to free a race from chattel slavery” (109). Combing through regimental histories, monument dedications, memoirs, and published “war papers,” Harris finds repeated denunciations of slavery and slaveholding, not just tributes to union or invocations of manhood. Ex-Confederates were welcome to rejoin the national fold—provided that they did it on Unionist terms. For their part, Confederate veterans fired back that they had fought to defend the original Constitution from northern aggression. Even when southern political leaders such as Fitzhugh Lee and John Warwick Daniel spoke in favor of reconciliation, they “insisted that they and their comrades craft reconciliatory efforts on very specific terms—those that reflected the ideals set forth by the Revolutionary generation and adopted by the Confederate States of America” (71). That is: Victory for me, “reconciliation” for you, which is to say no true reconciliation at all. It was not that [End Page 306] the veterans were unconcerned with intersectional peace. But “ultimately, the memories of their lived past stood between veterans’ desires and reality. While they did not set out to intentionally hinder reconciliation, their words often did exactly that” (4). The book is organized as a sort of debate between positions, beginning with the “atrocity narratives” both groups of veterans told about each other, particularly with regard to Civil War prisons and the devastation of Sherman’s March. We then learn about the Union veterans’ commemorative attacks on Confederate treason, ex-Confederate responses to those attacks, Union praise for emancipation and defense of the war as a moral cause, and ex-Confederate rebuttals to those claims. A brief but stimulating epilogue considers neo-Confederates and the changing memory of the war in the present-day South. Harris’s picture of old soldiers still crossing ideological swords thirty years after Appomattox (“fighting them over”) is in some ways a familiar one, because by 1900 it was the way many Americans understood and portrayed Civil War veterans. Young people born after 1865, migrants from one region to another, and the great wave of immigrants after 1890 were all ready to move on from the wartime polarities, a process of dilution that Harris, in his epilogue, suggests is still ongoing. But moving on from the war meant somehow coming to terms with what the war had wrought, which in the postwar South was a dark world of disfranchisement, night riding, and horrific racial violence. Reconstruction and its aftermath are essentially absent from Across the Bloody Chasm, and yet those were the public events shaping the cultural and political realm in which the old soldiers made their arguments. That the Union veterans continued to denounce slavery and treason is admirable, and Harris has...