My latest completed work is a volume of Civil War history: NiNi Harris's A Most Unsettled State. (The link is to an independent St. Louis bookstore. The book is also available from Amazon.) I'm not sure whether Harris should be referred to as the editor or the author, because the book is essentially a selection of primary sources from ( Read more... )

        So when I was down in Savannah recently, the History Museum in the old train station reminded me of a memoir I'd been meaning to read: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers, by Susie King Taylor. Taylor was a washerwoman with the regiment, the same regiment that Thomas ( Read more... )

        My latest read is Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. II, by, of all people, P. H. Sheridan. This volume covers the period from the staging of the Shenandoah Valley campaign to Sheridan's return from Europe after being an observer during the Franco-Prussian War. (Though he served as Commanding General, U.S. Army for several years, his ( Read more... )

         My copy of Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. I, by (surprise!) P. H. Sheridan is actually the 1888 British edition (Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly), rebound for a library. I guess Civil War generals were still interesting over there, two decades after the War.

One might suspect that West Point trained people to be good ( Read more... )

         George B. Abdill's Civil War Railroads: A Pictorial Story of the War between the States, 1861-1865 has been around 1961, and I'd consulted it in libraries before. The University of Indiana Press brought it out again, and I finally gave in and purchased it.
        Well, it's a classic. Abdill collected as many photographs of Civil War ( Read more... )

         Glory Road, the second volume of Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac Trilogy covers the period from the replacement of McClellan to the delivery of the Gettysburg Address. This means it covers Burnside's disasters (including the Mud March), Hooker's inability to capitalize on success, and Meade's impossible task: taking over a dispersed ( Read more... )

          My most recent daily-military-quota book was The Monitor Boys. John V. Quarstein has taken research on the entire crew list of the famous Civil War ironclad, and turned it into a narrative history. This includes a list of sailors who claimed to have served on her, but whose claims are not supported by the official records.
          I have ( Read more... )

          Walt Whitman's Memoranda during the War, is a very short work (under 70 pages) but one that is heavily quoted. Bruce Catton used it as a source, so did Shelby Foote, in his 3-volume narrative of the Civil War. Ken Burns used it in his mini-series. And why not? The man hung out in the hospitals, and gathered wounded from the battlefields, ( Read more... )

          My ongoing military history quota brought me to the end of the 1882 classic of Civil War memoirs: Company Aytch,, by Sam Watkins. The subtitle is Maury's Grays, First Tennessee Regiment; or, A Side Show of the Big Show. Watkins served as a private in the C.S.A. army, primarily under Cheatham and Cleburne.
          He fought under ( Read more... )

          I finished Personal and Military History of Philip Kearny, Major-General United States Volunteers, by John Watts De Peyster yesterday, and it has been my ten-pages-a-day quota book for several weeks. Frankly, I don't think I could have tolerated reading it any faster. It's a pretty badly written book.
          Why did I read it, then, you ( Read more... )