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No Place for Glory

| Filed under: Civil War Era, Civil War Soldiers and Strategies, Recent Releases, Understanding Civil War History
No Place for Glory/Wynstra. Kent State University Press

Over the years, many top historians have cited Major General Robert E. Rodes as the best division commander in Robert E. Lee’s vaunted army. Despite those accolades, Rodes faltered badly at Gettysburg, which stands as the only major blemish on his otherwise sterling record.

 


My Dear Nelly

| Filed under: Civil War Era, Interpreting the Civil War: Texts and Contexts, Recent Releases
My Dear Nelly edited by Paul Taylor. Kent State University Press

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, West Point engineer and Brevet Brigadier General Orlando M. Poe (1832–1895) remains one of the Union’s most unsung heroes. He served the Union in uniform from day one of the conflict until the Confederate surrender in North Carolina in late April 1865, and he used his unparalleled ability to predict Confederate movements to lead multiple successful campaigns that turned the tide of the war. Accordingly, the roar of battle permeates this collection of 241 highly literate and previously unpublished wartime letters to his wife, Eleanor Brent Poe.

 


Catholic Confederates

| Filed under: Civil War Era, Recent Releases, The Civil War Era in the South, U.S. History
Catholic Confederates by Gracjan Kraszewski. Kent State University Press

For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil War religion and American Catholicism. Kraszewski argues against an “Americanization” of Catholics in the South and instead coins the term “Confederatization” to describe the process by which Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors.

 


War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion

| Filed under: Civil War Era, Military History, Recent Releases, U.S. History
War, Memory and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion by Thomas R. Flagel. Kent State University Press

This June 29–July 4 reunion drew over 55,000 official attendees plus thousands more who descended upon a town of 4,000 during the scorching summer of 1913, with the promise of little more than a cot and two blankets, military fare, and the presence of countless adversaries from a horrific war. Most were revisiting a time and place in their personal history that involved acute physical and emotional trauma.

 


Blue-Blooded Cavalryman 

| Filed under: Civil War Era, Civil War Soldiers and Strategies, Military History, Recent Releases, U.S. History
Blue-Blooded Cavalryman by J. Gregory Acken. Kent State University Press

In May 1863, eighteen-year-old William Brooke Rawle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and traded a genteel, cultured life of privilege for service as a cavalry officer. Traveling from his home in Philadelphia to Virginia, he joined the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry and soon found himself in command of a company of veterans of two years’ service, some of whom were more than twice his age. Within eight weeks, he had participated in two of the largest cavalry battles of the war at Brandy Station and Gettysburg.

 


James Riley Weaver’s Civil War

, , and | Filed under: Civil War Era, Civil War Soldiers and Strategies, Military History, Recent Releases, U.S. History
James Riley Weaver's Civil War by Schlotterbeck, Wilson, Kawaue, and Klingensmith. Kent State University Press.

Captured on October 11, 1863, James Riley Weaver, a Union cavalry officer, spent nearly seventeen months in Confederate prisons. Remarkably, Weaver kept a diary that documents 666 consecutive days of his experience, including his cavalry duties, life in a series of prisons throughout the South, and his return to civilian life. It is an unparalleled eyewitness account of a crucial part of our history.

 


Meade

| Filed under: Civil War Era, Civil War Soldiers and Strategies, Military History, Recent Releases, U.S. History, Understanding Civil War History
Meade by John G. Selby. Kent State University Press

George Gordon Meade has not been treated kindly by history. Victorious at Gettysburg, the biggest battle of the American Civil War, Meade was the longest-serving commander of the Army of the Potomac, leading his army through the brutal Overland Campaign and on to the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Serving alongside his new superior, Ulysses S. Grant, in the last year of the war, his role has been overshadowed by the popular Grant. This first full-length study of Meade’s two-year tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac brings him out of Grant’s shadow and into focus as one of the top three Union generals of the war.

 


At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion

| Filed under: Audiobooks, Award Winners, Civil War Era, Civil War Soldiers and Strategies, Military History, Recent Releases, U.S. History, Understanding Civil War History
At the Forefront of Lee's Invasion by Robert J. Wynstra. Kent State University Press

After clearing Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley of Federal troops, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s bold invasion into the North reached the Maryland shore of the Potomac River on June 15, 1863. A week later, the Confederate infantry crossed into lower Pennsylvania, where they had their first sustained interactions with the civilian population in a solidly pro-Union state. Most of the initial encounters with the people in the lush Cumberland Valley and the neighboring parts of the state involved the men from the Army of Northern Virginia’s famed Second Corps, commanded by Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, who led the way as Lee’s veteran soldiers advanced north toward their eventual showdown with the Union army at the crossroads town of Gettysburg.

 


Women and the American Civil War

and | Filed under: Civil War Era, Explore Women's History, U.S. History, Understanding Civil War History, Women’s Studies
Women in the American Civil War by Giesberg and Miller. Kent State University Press.

The scholarship on women’s experiences in the U.S. Civil War is rich and deep, but much of it remains regionally specific or subsumed in more general treatments of Northern and Southern peoples during the war. In a series of eight paired essays, scholars examine women’s comparable experiences across the regions, focusing particularly on women’s politics, wartime mobilization, emancipation, wartime relief, women and families, religion, reconstruction, and Civil War memory. In each pairing, historians analyze women’s lives, interests, and engagement in public issues and private concerns and think critically about what stories and questions still need attention. Among their questions are:

 


Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons

| Filed under: Award Winners, Civil War Era, Justice Studies, U.S. History, Understanding Civil War History
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons by Angela M. Zombek. Kent State University Press

Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons confronts the enduring claim that Civil War military prisons represented an apocalyptic and ahistorical rupture in America’s otherwise linear and progressive carceral history. Instead, it places the war years in the broader context of imprisonment in 19th-century America and contends that officers in charge of military prisons drew on administrative and punitive practices that existed in antebellum and wartime civilian penitentiaries to manage the war’s crisis of imprisonment. Union and Confederate officials outlined rules for military prisons, instituted punishments, implemented prison labor, and organized prisoners of war, both civilian and military, in much the same way as peacetime penitentiary officials had done, leading journalists to refer to many military prisons as “penitentiaries.”

 


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