War Books Research Articles

A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South

Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is pleased to speak with Michael Robinson assistant professor of history at the University of Mobile. Today we are here to talk with him about his new book, A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South. Professor Robinson, thank you for joining us today.

Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature by Kristin L. Matthews

Reviewed by: Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature by Kristin L. Matthews Brian K. Goodman Matthews, Kristin L. 2016. Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $90.00 hc. $29.95 sc. 222 pp. "In the war between capitalism and Communism," wrote the reformed Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers in 1952, "books are weapons, and, like all serviceable weapons, loaded." But as Kristin L. Matthews shows in her valuable study, Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, by the start of the Cold War books had been treated as loaded weapons for some time. During the Second World War, for instance, the Office of War Information distributed posters reminding American citizens that "BOOKS ARE WEAPONS IN THE WAR OF IDEAS" (22). What was different for Americans during the early Cold War was a new faith in the "seemingly unlimited power" of the United States, a flimsy confidence that still masked a lingering sense of cultural insecurity (11). In Reading America, Matthews introduces us to the extensive postwar "reading industrial complex" that responded to this paradoxical situation by further "weaponizing" long-standing American discourses linking literacy, citizenship, and freedom (18). All this hawkish language is a reminder that scholars of Cold War literary culture are one of the only groups as fond of using martial metaphors as Cold Warriors themselves. By now most recent scholarship in the field has left behind the master trope of "containment," an impressively flexible concept imported from US military and diplomatic strategy. But new research is still being pursued [End Page 571] in the shadow of the so-called "cultural Cold War," a framing that turns scholars into sleuths, sniffing around for evidence of covert CIA funding that might corroborate our most paranoid readings of the period's literature. Matthews successfully avoids this trap in Reading America, while still embracing one of the most promising trends in recent Cold War literary studies: a methodological turn toward book history and the comparative study of print cultures. But unlike recent works such as Greg Barnhisel's indispensable Cold War Modernists (2015), Matthews turns away from the "cultural war abroad," focusing instead on the battles over literacy and reading that raged on the "home front" (14, 16). Matthews begins Reading America by reconstructing the overlapping historical contexts that produced a reading boom in early Cold War America. In her introduction and first chapter, Matthews shows how a range of factors, including the paperback revolution, the G.I. Bill, the rise of New Criticism in universities, the Great Books Program, and popular reading clubs, put more books in American hands than ever before while also prescribing what it meant to be a "good" reader. Meanwhile, the postwar book market was flooded with best-selling reading guides, anticommunist primers, and works by panicked literacy experts with titles like What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't (1961). Matthews describes the new Cold War consensus as the conviction that "reading particular texts in the right way could train Americans to understand, practice, defend, and spread democracy across the globe" (10). In subsequent chapters, Matthews does show how this consensus evolved and fractured over time, but her primary attention shifts to the function of reading within classic works of Cold War literature. For instance, in her second chapter, Matthews explores the "intersections among reading, maturity, and postwar character" in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951), an object of perennial interest for scholars in the field. But whereas previous works by Alan Nadel, Pamela Steinle, and Leerom Medovoi have focused on the public reception of Catcher in the Rye or the ways the book figured in wider cultural debates, Matthews turns inward, performing a counterintuitive reading of the text itself, in order to "illuminate" broader developments in Cold War reading culture (33). Far from characterizing Catcher in the Rye as a novel of rebellion, Matthews presents Salinger's prematurely gray protagonist Holden Caulfield as the fulfillment of the postwar ideal of the "mature citizen-reader" (42). Holden is a nostalgic and censorious reader, a cultural traditionalist [End Page 572] searching for stability and order in a discordant world. According to Matthews, Holden is essentially...

Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is pleased to speak with Graham Peck Professor of History at Saint Xavier University and the author of several articles, which include “How Moderate Were the Moderates? Reconsidering the Origins of the Republican Party in Illinois” and “Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of an Antislavery Nationalism.” Today we are here to talk with him about his new book, Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom. Professor Peck, thank you for joining us today.

The Literature of Reconstruction, Not in Plain Black and White

Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is pleased to speak with Brook Thomas Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California--Irvine and the author of several books including Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship and American Literary Realism and The Failed Promise of Contract. Today we are here to talk with him about his new book, The Literature of Reconstruction, Not in Plain Black and White. Professor Thomas, thank you for joining us today.

"Moulder[ing] into nothingness among the rocks": Sharpshooters in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War

During the American Civil War, sharpshooters were contested figures in the Northern media. Magazines published romanticized profiles of Union snipers, while simultaneously worrying about the deadliness of Confederate sharpshooters. Years after the war, in 1896, the aging painter Winslow Homer wrote that the sharpshooters' task was as "near to murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army." Accompanying this sentiment, Homer sketched, in the letter, a soldier trapped within the crosshairs of a sniper's scope. I use this sketch, along with Homer's words to his friend, as a way to understand the significance of two battlefield portraits of deceased Confederate sharpshooters found in Alexander Gardner's iconic Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. Art historian Anthony Lee posits that the photographic book, as a whole, is an "effort at imaginative recovery." The past, for Gardner, is "unromantic," and the future, "uncertain, and unpromising." Locked in Gardner's camera's scope, the Southern sharpshooter is memorialized as a failed warrior, while the Northern sharpshooter is allowed to safely fade from memory. As figures of moral controversy and anarchic disunion, the sharpshooters of both armies must be consigned to the past in order to pave the way for the tenuous Federal future.

Experiences, Images and Political Reflections on the First World War in Italian Interwar Literature

AbstractThe historiography of the First World War has become well‐established branch of contemporary history in its own right. In the past years, it has analysed in depth a boundless number of issues on the basis of diaries and memoirs written by soldiers during and after their experiences in the trenches. These studies have improved our knowledge of the war and of the soldiers’ reactions to their tragic familiarity with death. Recently, historians have focused on the social aspects of the Great War and its aftermath. In particular, they have considered war memorials, life behind the frontline, practical mobilization of a national system, and supply problems both in the trenches and within civil societies. However, in this excellent historical research the lion's share is made up of British, French and German diaries, memoirs and war books. Experiences lived by soldiers of different nationalities are known to a lesser degree. In this article I will try to explain how, in the years between the two world wars, Italian war veterans described to their reading public what they experienced during the conflict. I believe that a general analysis of Italian interventionism, of the expectations it created and the disappointments over a conflict that was showing the nation's unpreparedness, still remains of great importance. The present article will not only show the extent to which Italian war literature was permeated by piety and emotion towards comrades and, sometimes, enemies who shared the devastating ordeal of the trenches, it will also highlight how it was pervaded by political implications that were peculiar to Italian social and political conditions of the time.

Reembodying Our Occupied Geographies: Boyd Cothran's Remembering the Modoc War, Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide, and the Future of Native American Studies

Narratives of innocence are stories born of the dispossession of bodies from lands that continue to serve as vectors of violence, reenacting the scene that created them. The term was introduced by Boyd Cothran to describe the cunning afterlife of conflicts between settler states and indigenous peoples: state violence yields stories that reiterate erasure, weaponizing memory to forget the lessons of colonization. In a situation of violence that produces silence, names resonate as instruments of clarity, cutting through erasure. Genocide is a name historians are now using to describe a process of erasure that created modern California, a process indigenous people have long discussed that narratives of innocence have silenced. Through a reading of Cothran's book Remembering the Modoc War and Benjamin Madley's book An American Genocide against an older literary genre on violence ranging from Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, I take California as an emblem of a profound alteration in the way the United States processes the trace memory of indigenous erasure. A historical reckoning is now underway as indigenous people reembody their occupied geographies, returning their stories to the land and, in the process, reconfiguring the national narrative.

The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900–1940 ed. by Nicola Wilson

Reviewed by: The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900–1940 ed. by Nicola Wilson Patrick Collier The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900–1940. Edited by Nicola Wilson. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xiii + 221. $135.00 (cloth). The turn of the twenty-first century saw the return of the literary marketplace to studies of modernism. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt’s edited collection Marketing Modernisms (1997), Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism (1998), and Joyce Piell Wexler’s Who Paid for Modernism? (1997), among others, registered a surge of critical interest in the material realities that underpinned texts and reputations, and fueled a continuing stream of work that mines publishers’ archives, the correspondence of writers and agents, and periodicals. These works foregrounded the now-inescapable truth that the literature that has survived has always been paid for somehow, has gained its survival in part through the processes of commodification; literature has always, to quote Virginia Woolf, been “attached at every corner to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”1 As Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz noted in 2008, the “marketing of modernism” moment helped lay the foundation for readings of modernism’s relations with publicity and “mass media rhetorics”—one of the new directions in modernist studies that was becoming visible in the late 2000s and which continues to produce vital work that links media transformation with aesthetic production.2 In Nicola Wilson’s new collection The Book World: Selling and Distributing British Literature, 1900–1940, one finds the influence of Dettmar, Watt, et al.—who are ritualistically name-checked at the start of several chapters—trickling down to contemporary scholarship in a new way. For if the “marketing modernism” turn opened up vast new archives and a broad field of inquiry, this field was nonetheless limited by the prominence of the m-word—modernism—in the titles of all the major critical texts. In The Book World we find questions of marketing, distribution, sales, and reader practices applied to the world of “British literature” much more broadly. The book emerges from a 2012 symposium at the University of Reading (whose Special Collections archive enabled several of the essays), and is part of Brill’s Library of the Written Word series. The salutary results include fascinating glimpses into the [End Page 879] reading lives of ordinary Britons and genuine, open-minded questioning of the benefits readers got from reading such pulp writers as A. C. Gunter and Ethel M. Dell. Even when familiar modernist names surface here, they are used as means to the end of a greater understanding of particularities of the print marketplace. Several chapters offer detailed accounts of how writers and publishers conceived of their specific markets and sought to appeal to them, through advertising, textual design, activation of professional networks, and canny evocation of the multiple kinds of capital at stake. To cite one instance, we learn a good deal about Richard Aldington’s semisuccessful war novel in Vincent Trott’s “‘The Market is Getting Flooded with Them’: Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and the War Books Boom.” But we learn at least as much about an interesting and undersung figure in post-war publishing, Charles Prentice of Chatto & Windus. (Among other things, Prentice edited the Phoenix Library series, which brought Marcel Proust, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and Lytton Strachey to wide-ish readerships in the late twenties and early thirties.) We learn more still about the perils of trying to ride a popular market trend with a bitterly disillusioned novel. Drawing on letters between Aldington and Prentice held at Reading, Trott walks us through the novel’s early history. It began with commercial intentions: Aldington was aware of the gathering “war books boom,” marked by the success of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and proposed the book to Prentice before it was written. Its marketing and material design, including a jacket blurb, tried to thread the needle between the ambient “disillusionment” narrative and more conservative, patriotic sentiments within the public...

Outsider Positions: Negotiating Gender, Nationality and Memory in the War Writing of Enid Bagnold

ABSTRACTIn 1918, Enid Bagnold published A Diary Without Dates, a revealing book that kept few secrets about life in a wartime hospital. Bagnold's book has helped the construction of the mythology of disillusionment that has clouded memory of the First World War for a century. In 1920, Bagnold published The Happy Foreigner, a novel that is much less easy to categorize. As her protagonist, Fanny, drives across the derelict battlefields of France, she reflects on the ways in which those battlefields may be recalled in later cultural memory. However, there is a curious optimism in Fanny that is quite at odds with these later constructions of disillusionment. France in 1919 is a melting pot of different people, military and civilian, men and women, representing many different nations as the first understandings of memory crystallize. This essay explores Bagnold’s two war books in terms of the ways in which she negotiates gender and nationality. What does it mean to be a woman in a hospital? How do different nationalities interact in the post-war landscape, questioning these myths of disillusionment before they are even constructed? By considering these outsider positions, the author argues that Bagnold's role in helping to shape the memory of the First World War is far more complex than it might at first appear.

Pendidikan Jihad Menurut Imam Bukhari (Studi Naskah Hadits-Hadits Kitab al Jihad Dalam Shahih Bukhari)

<p>There are two mistaken blocks in looking upon the essence of the holy war that apparently influence the religious and social life. It implies that there is a group that sees sarcastically to the terminology of the holy war even there is one that tries to eliminate from the Islamic Shari�a. On the other hand, it appears a group that behaves in extreme way and sees the holy war in narrow outlook, that is war. This is the importance of propagating the education of the holy war with the right way referring to the authoritative Islamic scholars. This research focuses on the holy war education of Imam Bukhari by studying chapters and hadiths arranged in the book of the holy war in his shahih book. So that it can be known how the idea of Imam Bukhari in the holy war education with the focus on four education components, those are goal, program, method and evaluation then how the implementation in the contemporary world of education. According to the Title of the research, so the kind of research used is the library research. The library research is a research which is carried out both with literature and non-literature. Among the samples of literature are books, notes, or the report of research from previous researches. As for the samples of non-literature, such as audio record and visual record. This research reveals the finding of the Imam Bukhari�s holy war education that� consists of goals those are related to the urgency of aqeedah, morals (akhlaq), the wide meaning of the holy war, and the urgency of healthe body. The Material of Aqeedah related faith, obedient, sincere, receive (tawakal), love, scare,and hope to Allah. The Materials of morals (akhlaq), such as patience, honesty, enthusiastic in doing war, courage, genorosity, keeping promise, compassionate, modesty (tawadhu�), wisdom, and avoiding evil character. The spiritual Material such as cumpolsory prayer (shalat), sunnah prayer, fasting, pray,reciting Al-Qur�an, saying takbeer, tahlil, and tasbih. The Physical Material such as keeping body hygiene, protecting and caring of body in order not to get wound, keeping physical hygiene by treating wound, keeping stamina and body hygiene by consuming good food and doing exercises before war. The methods applied are not less than 20 methods. And the evaluation by considering the quantity and the power of soldiers, security condition, preparing reserve commander, the couse of loss, joining in the holy war and administering sanctions. The ide of Imam Bukhari in the holy war education is very comprehensive, effective, and aplicative. So it is important to study his idea so that the comprehension of the holy war conception can be comprehensive and unimpaired. And it is possible, that the thing discovered in the research would be implemented in the world of education and can be used as one of referrence in learning.</p><strong>Keyword</strong>: jihad education, library research, Shahih Bukhari

Behind the Lines: War Books of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, 1914 - 1918 (pp 233-260)

An analysis of published and unpublished materials generated by the Canadian Army Medical Corps during the First World War demonstrates that Canadian doctors and nurses serving in France created a narrative of the Great War that was more optimistic in its message than the canonical war books written in the 1920s and 1930s and more internationalist in orientation than the dominant narrative of the war created in Canada after the war.

What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth‐Century AmericaErin A.Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America Erin A. Smith. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.Most readers will recognize in the title of Erin Smith's What Would Jesus Read an echo of Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897). Scholar of American popular literature and historian of print culture, Smith acknowledges wide and diverse audience as contributing the long process of writing book described as a historical examination of selected twentieth-century popular books and the communities of readers and for whom they were (1). What Would Jesus Read? makes compelling by demonstrating that religious reading [in secular age] continues shape the ideas and assumptions of millions of modern and contemporary Americans (2). Smith locates What Would Jesus Read? at the intersection of three field of scholarship-the history of the book, lived religion, and consumer (3). She seeks to contribute more representative history of reading in America, one that includes the entire reading public, not just self-consciously literary readers and writers (3). Smith argues that these much-loved (and much maligned) books [selected titles spanning long twentieth century] illuminate non-literary ways of reading that assume that literature and life are connected and that the right kind of reading can inspire the faithful build better world (3).What Would Jesus Read? presents case studies of important books, the communities for whom they were important, and the literary and institutions that made them available audiences (5). Smith structures her book into five chronological sections that focus on specific kinds of books and readers-the Social novel (1880s-1910s), best-selling life of Jesus from the 1920s 'religious renaissance,' self-help books of the post-World War II revival, popular account of the apocalypse from the 1970s and early 1980s, and books for the seeker in the 1990's 'decade of the soul' and beyond (5). The selected books for each of these eras connect along the lines of consumer culture and reading (use of advertising and innovative marketing, transition from emphasis on salvation self-realization), relationship the academy (differentiating from abstract literacy mingling of literature and life), and relationship organized religion (challenging church leaders and filling spiritual vacuums); Smith contends readers read these selected books for usefulness, their erasure of history and historical context, and their scandalous intermingling of sacred and profane, culture and commerce (9,11).Smith presents the following studies as representative of each of the above chronological sections: Humphrey Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888), Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897), and Winston Churchill's Inside of the Cup (1913); Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows (1925), The Book Nobody Knows (1926), and What Can Man Believe? (1928); Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick's On Being Real Person (1943), Rabbi Joshua Liebman's Peace of Mind (1946), Bishop Fulton Sheen's Peace of Soul (1949), Rev. …

Meštrović in the media, 1919–39: changing perceptions of the sculptor in print

‘This is a war book.’ Thus did the Serbian poet, editor and translator Milan Ćurčin introduce the first major monograph on Meštrović in English, published by Williams and Norgate in 1919. Beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, it was unashamedly propagandistic for, as Ćurčin explained, ‘both the exhibition of the sculpture [at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1915] and the publication of this book form part of an attempted scheme to supplement the military reputation of the Serbocroats by demonstrating the civilising capacities of the race’. This article focuses on the twenty years of peace that followed, and considers some of the main British and French books and exhibition catalogues in which Meštrović was represented between 1919 and 1939. It asks why, even in a radically different era, critical reception of his work was still so frequently framed by political and cultural agendas extraneous to the art of sculpture, and to his own art, and how that has affected his subsequent reputation.

Cwbr Author Interview: The Long Emancipation: The Demise Of Slavery In The United States

Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is happy to speak with Ira Berlin, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Professor Berlin previously authored, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South; Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States; as well as Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America. Today we get to talk about his most recent book, The Long Emancipation: The Demise of slavery in the United States. Professor Berlin, thank you for chatting with us today. Ira Berlin (IB): I'm delighted to be joining you.

Cwbr Author Interview: Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, And White Supremacy In Civil War-era Charleston

Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is pleased to speak with Jeff Strickland, Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. Today we get to talk about his most recent book, Unequal Freedoms: Ethnicity, Race, and White Supremacy in Civil War-Era Charleston. Professor Strickland, thank you for joining us today. Jeff Strickland (JS): Hi Zach, it's an honor to speak with you.

Civil War Treasures: A Legacy of Children's Civil War Literature in Words and Pictures: The Michael Lehman Williamson Collection of Civil War Books for Young People

Civil War Treasures: A Legacy of Children's Civil War Literature in Words and Pictures: The Michael Lehman Williamson Collection of Civil War Books for Young People

The Cultural Cold War and the Circulation of World Literature

Historians of the Cold War are often quick to dismiss the role of books and translation programs of the era as propaganda. To contest this, we combine insights from cultural Cold War studies, Translation Studies and World Literature, illustrating the circulation of books and world literature through a Cold War book program. Documentary evidence from the Franklin Book Programs indicate that although Franklin men were engaged in a soft mode of promoting American culture and values, they were not simply Cold War warriors nor was the program a pure propaganda project. The complexity of obtaining and negotiating copyright, the various roles of the local Franklin men and the program’s impact on translation and on publishing contest a propagandist reading. Interdisciplinary research on the impact and legacy of the Franklin Book Programs in a non-aligned context can contribute to a better understanding of the global patterns of the circulation of world literature in their local manifestations.

Fiction and memoir of Britain’s Great War: disillusioned or disparate?

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.

Orizzonti di gloria e il canone del cinema bellico (1957)

Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) is the first relevant American film on World War I after Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941). Inevitably, World War Two, and the subsequent Cold War (with its hot moment in Korea), totally re-orienteered the movie genre, that in the thirties had flourished mainly on the memory - mediated by the war books boom of the late twenties - of the Great War. When he chooses to go back to the 1914-18 conflict, Kubrick deliberately goes back to the pre-World War Two canon, epitomized by Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). But at the same time, Paths of Glory represents the beginning of a new canon. Telling the story of a grotesque court-martial trial in a first line French infantry division, Kubrick depicts the Great War as the quintessence of every possible mass mechanized conflict, posing the founding stones of a canon which is still productive today.

A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon.” by Castle McLaughlin (review)

Reviewed by: A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon.” by Castle McLaughlin Colin G. Calloway A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon.” By Castle McLaughlin. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2013. vi + 355 pp. Illustrations, maps, glossary, references, index. $50.00 paper. A few days after the Lakota and Cheyenne victory at the Little Bighorn in 1876, soldiers took a ledger containing seventy-seven pictographic drawings from a funerary tipi on the battlefield. James W. “Phocion” Howard, a newspaper reporter traveling with the US cavalry, acquired the book; he rearranged the pages, wrote an introduction, and had the manuscript made into a handsome leather-bound volume entitled “The Pictorial Autobiography of Half Moon, an Uncpapa Sioux Chief.” Howard apparently inferred the chief’s name from the crescent moon symbol on one of the shields in the drawings. But Plains shield iconography invoked supernatural entities, not personal names, and the collection was likely the work of a half dozen warrior-artists. In 1930 the manuscript was part of a bequest to Harvard University, and in 2005 it came to the attention of Castle McLaughlin, curator of North American ethnography at the university’s Peabody Museum. Peabody staged an exhibition of the drawings in 2009. A Lakota War Book presents a full-color facsimile of the “Half Moon” manuscript and summarizes the research and analysis conducted by museum staff, scholarly consultants, and members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Ledger art is a rich resource for understanding Plains Indian history and culture, and if this were just another book about another collection of ledger art it would be welcome enough. But McLaughlin gives us more, arguing that the Half Moon drawings constitute a “war book” and that war books should be distinguished from ledger art in general. War books had a significant role in the practice as well as the representation of war. For the warriors who inscribed depictions of their victories on objects captured from Americans, these books expressed their dominance and appropriated their enemies’ power. Most surviving ledger art dates from the reservation period when drawings that showed killing white men might provide incriminating evidence. The Half Moon drawings were done earlier and evidently depict fighting in the Red Cloud War of 1866–68. A war book containing the combat exploits of multiple warriors reflected and reinforced the shared resistance of new intertribal coalitions that developed in response to the American invasion of the Plains. Tracing the life story of the Half Moon manuscript reveals that the manuscript itself was a site of contestation and changing meanings. Indians captured an accountant’s ledger and transformed it into a record of resistance; a Chicago newspaperman repossessed it and transformed it again into a popular narrative [End Page 309] form and a fictional autobiography. McLaughlin’s remarkable book adds another chapter to the Half Moon story and a further layer to the study of Plains Indian ledger art. Colin G. Calloway Native American Studies Dartmouth College Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln