What American Civil War Books Are You Planning On Buying/Reading Next?

R. Evans

Sergeant
Joined
Jan 19, 2013
Location
Salem, Ohio
Forgive me if there is a thread like this around. I did a search and couldn't find anything.:smile:

So here goes. These 3 should be here tomorrow or Saturday. Can't wait to dive in.​
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I picked up David Powell's The Chickamauga Campaign - Glory or the Grave a while back intending to read it as soon as I finished his first volume. While events did not go as planned, I finally got started. It's as well done as the first volume and has added clarity to my understanding of the battle.
 
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I picked up David Powell's The Chickamauga Campaign - Glory or the Grave a while back intending to read it as soon as I finished his first volume. While events did not go as planned, I finally got started. It's as well done as the first volume and has added clarity to my understanding of the battle.
I have all five of his books on Chickamauga and they really help you to understand this misunderstood battle.VOLUME I I I of the Chickamauga Campaign is a gem all by itself with its bibliograph.I have spent hours on it especially reading the links to the National Tribune where you get all the first hand accounts.
 
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It's fiction, but I've been listening to Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule. I don't normally do audio books, but I have a scribd subscription and get two audio books a month and it's nice to listen while I'm at work. However, the lady doing the reading--the voice she uses for Grant kills me. Actually, for those of you who watch Mercy Street, it sounds exactly like that one character in the episode who was a woman pretending to be a man. To be fair, it is a woman pretending to be a man...

I also ordered and received Tooley's The Peace That Almost Was--based on a recommendation on this forum--and I am looking forward to starting it.
 
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started "Gideon Welles-Lincoln's Navy Department" by Richard S. West. Although published in 1943, it appears to be an excellent bio of Welles. Outside his diary, I think there has only been one other bio of him, and that was in 1992(?).
 
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"Our Aim Was Man." It's about the First Andrew Sharp Shooters. The introduction is terrific and it's the first book I started reading the endnotes before the rest of the book.
 
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An oldie (1936 edition) I purchased when visiting Stonewall Jackson's Headquarters Museum at Winchester; so far I'm just past First Manassas; hopefully this time around the South will win!

You know, every time I re-read Lee's Lieutenants, I get all excited in the first volume. By the second, I'm getting depressed. By the third, I'm disgusted and making nasty comments about "those people" :smile:
 
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"Our Aim Was Man." It's about the First Andrew Sharp Shooters. The introduction is terrific and it's the first book I started reading the endnotes before the rest of the book.
You got me on this one as I have no idea who the First Andrew Sharpshooter were,I will now go look them up.

Edit.okay I looked them up and now I know you are writingabout.
 
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Yesterday I acquired Lincoln’s Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days that Changed a Presidency, March 24 – April 8, 1865 by Noah Andre Trudeau for $1.99 on my Kindle. The book covers in detail Lincoln's trip to City Point and Richmond just before the end of the War.
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Trudeau follows the same format in Lincoln’s Greatest Journey: Sixteen Days that Changed a Presidency, March 24 – April 8, 1865 as he did Southern Storm in that he outlines Lincoln's trip to Petersburg and Richmond on a day by day basis. Had he stayed strictly with Lincoln's itinerary it would have been a rather short book. Trudeau expands the work by following the operations of Grant and the Army of the Potomac in the finals days at Petersburg.

One topic I found of interest was Trudeau's presentation of Mary Lincoln. Much of what I have read about Mary on this trip seemed to indicate she was irrationally jealous of Abraham Lincoln's interactions with Julia Grant and Mary Ord, seeming to think they were trying to steal the President's affections. My impression was that Trudeau is suggesting that the casual atmosphere and interaction of the army wives grated on Mary's sense of social propriety.

All in all it is an interesting read and I learned some things.
 
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I just received some "coffee table" tomes - The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference and Guns of the Civil War by Dennis Adler. The Amazon seller (Nash books in Tennessee) that I bought the Guns of the Civil War from kindly sent a free copy of Johnny Reb: The Uniform of the Confederate Army, 1861-1865. My reading has to be done in short bursts right now due to being back in school so the encyclopedia-like nature of the first two is great for that. The Johnny Reb book isn't a coffee-table type as such, but it's set up like the other two in that it has a lot of detailed pics with descriptions.
 
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"War of Another Kind-A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion"-by Wayne K. Durrill
In this book Durrill describes in graphic detail the disintegration, during the Civil War, of Southern plantation society in a North Carolina coastal county. He details struggles among planters, slaves, yeoman farmers, and landless white laborers, as well as a guerrilla war and a clash between two armies that, in the end, destroyed all that remained of the county's social structure. He examines the failure of a planter-yeoman alliance, and discusses how yeoman farmers and landless white laborers allied themselves against planters, but to no avail. He also shows how slaves, when refugeed upcountry, tried unsuccessfully to reestablish their prerogatives--a subsistence, as well as protection from violence--owed them as a minimal condition of their servitude.
 
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