America’s Civil War November 2010

Sorry to be so late with this.  Inside this issue:

Letters

Everybody’s mad at Harold Holzer because as we all know Slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War and if it hadn’t ever existed in the first place there still would have been a war because of, ummm, er, ah, TARIFFS – yeah, that’s the ticket!

News

• Segways on the battlefield and other high-tech touring trends.
• Gettysburg Casino debate.
• Interview with Gettysburg College Civil War Institute’s Pete Carmichael (which put the kibosh on one that was in the works for Bull Runnings).  Read it online here.

Features

• Dateline: Gettysburg (Richard Pyle) – a reporter on the Gettysburg Address.
• Shooting Above the Clouds – Photos at Lookout Mountain
• Uncivil Action (Jonathan Turley) – The legality (or not) of Secession.
• Bring Out the Big Guns – Pros and cons of siege guns
• The Tactical Genius of Bloody Bill Anderson (Sean McLachlan) – Hunh?
• Twilight at the White House (David Selby) – The actor who portrayed Quentin Collins on Dark Shadows weighs in on Abe and Nosferatu.  I’ve written a bit on that here.

Reviews

• The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg’s Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865, John J. Fox, III
• Indiana’s War: The Civil War in Documents, Richard Nation and Stephen Towne, eds.
• Union Combined Operations in the Civil War, Craig L. Symonds, ed. (this review is notable because Symonds is quoted as criticising Rowena Reed’s similarly titled book not because of methodology or handling of evidence or inaccuracies, but because  of what some perceive as the author’s “determination to portray [George] McClellan as a military genius of war.”  Very curious criticism indeed – I wonder how this determination is proven.)
• The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of  1864, Jack H. Lepa
• Libby Prison Breakout: The Daring Escape From the Notorious Civil War Prison, Joseph Wheelan.
• Jews and the Civil War: A Reader, Jonathan D. Sarna and Adam Mendelsohn, eds.
• An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge, Robert Enrico, Director.  View the film as presented on The Twilight Zone here.
• In this issue, I was Just Wild About:
  • Breckinridge: Statesman, Soldier, Symbol, William C. Davis (reissue).
  • Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership Between a President and His General, John C. Waugh.
  • Louisianans in the Western Confederacy: The Adams-Gibson Brigade in the Civil War, Stuart Salling.  See Stuart’s blog here.
  • A Friendly Little War, John Sherman.  Fiction by a descendant of Cump’s brother.