Preview: Three Recent Releases from Savas Beatie

I apologize for the delay in posting this, but here are recaps for three recent Savas Beatie publications.

From the jacket:

“When Hell Came to Sharpsburg” investigates how the battle and its armies wreaked emotional, physical, and financial havoc on the people of Sharpsburg. For proper context, the author explores the savage struggle and its gory aftermath and explains how soldiers stripped the community of resources and spread diseases. Cowie carefully and meticulously follows fortunes of individual families like the Mummas, Roulettes, Millers, and many others—ordinary folk thrust into harrowing circumstances—and their struggle to recover from their unexpected and often devastating losses.”

What you get:

• 464 pages of text in 12 chapters
• 34 page bibliography, including numerous manuscript and newspaper sources.
• Index
• Bottom of page footnotes
• Forewords by Dennis Frye and John Schildt
• 8 Hal Jesperson maps, including town plat map and list of lot owners
• Photos and illustrations throughout

From the jacket:

Scott L. Mingus Sr. and Eric J. Wittenberg, the authors of more than forty Civil War books, have once again teamed up to present a history of the opening moves of the Gettysburg Campaign in the two-volume study “If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania”: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac March to Gettysburg. This compelling study is one of the first to integrate the military, media, political, social, economic, and civilian perspectives with rank-and-file accounts from the soldiers of both armies as they inexorably march toward their destiny at Gettysburg. This first installment covers June 3–21, 1863, while the second, spanning June 22–30, completes the march and carries the armies to the eve of the fighting.

You get:

• 409 pages of text in 19 chapters, by day
• Appendix on the itineraries of the armies
• Bibliography to follow in volume 2
• 14 page Dramatis Personae
• Index
• Bottom of page footnotes
• Foreword by Dr. Jennifer Murray
• 31 Edward Alexander maps
• Photos and illustrations throughout

From the jacket:

In Six Miles from Charleston, Five Minutes to Hell: The Battle of Secessionville, June 16, 1862, historian Jim Morgan examines the James Island campaign and its aftermath. By including several original sources not previously explored, he takes a fresh look at this small, but potentially game-changing fight, and shows that it was of much more than merely local interest at the time.

You get:

• 151 pages of text in 12 chapters
• 2 appendixes: driving tour and the Campbell brothers of the 79th New York Volunteers
• Order of Battle
• 14 page Dramatis Personae
• Foreword by Dr. Kyle Sinisi
• 10 Edward Alexander maps
• Photos and illustrations throughout

Previews: More from Savas Beatie

The good folks at Savas Beatie, prolific publishers of our peculiar predilection, have been busy this year. Over the past couple of months, they’ve cranked out a number of new books, and I think I’ve received most of them. Due to time restraints, I’ve provided titles, authors, and links for info and ordering.

• Meade and Lee at Bristoe Station: The Problems of Command and Strategy after Gettysburg, from Brandy Station to the Buckland Races, August 1 to October 31, 1863, by James Wm. Hunt.
• Targeted Tracks: The Cumberland Valley Railroad in the Civil War, 1861-1865, by Scott L. Mingus, Sr., and Cooper H. Wingert.
• Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard: Longstreet Sickles, and the Bloody Fight for the “Commanding Ground” Along the Emmitsburg Road, by James A. Hessler and Britt C. Isenberg. [I’ll have an interview with the authors soon.]
• Union Command and Control Failure in the Shenandoah: Major General Franz Sigel and the War in the Valley of Virginia, May 1864, by David A. Powell. {Working on an interview with the author of this as well.]
• “Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospital and the Battle of Gettysburg, by Ronald D. Kirkwood.
• Confederate Soldiers in the American Civil War, by Mark Hughes.

 

 

Preview: Mingus & Wittenberg, “The Second Battle of Winchester”

New from Savas Beatie is a joint effort by Scott L. Mingus, Sr and Eric J. Wittenberg, The Second Battle of Winchester: The Confederate Victory that Opened the Door to Gettysburg. I’m looking forward to this mainly because I’ve always been struck by the inconsistencies between the old saw of Richard Ewell having lost his aggressiveness – and decisiveness – after his wounding at Brawner’s Farm and marriage, and his performance at this prelude to Gettysburg. I’ll be interested to see if and how the authors have addressed that conundrum.

Here’s what you get: 429 (!) pages of narrative, with Hal Jesperson maps and plenty of illustrations, including present day photos; a driving tour appendix with seven stops and an extended tour with six more; Orders of Battle for Second Winchester and Martinsburg; a list of surgeons and chaplains captured during Second Winchester who were sent on to Libby Prison; the March 14, 1863 Resolution of the 123rd Ohio; a bibliography with plenty of primary sources; a full index; and the usual Savas Beatie page-bottom footnotes.

Preview: Mingus & McClure, “Civil War Voices from York County, PA”

Scott L. Mingus, Sr. sent me a copy of his latest, Civil War Voices from York County, PA: Remembering the Rebellion and the Gettysburg Campaign, co-written with James McClure. Scott is now officially prolific – check out his author page on Amazon. Jim McClure is the editor of the York Daily Record newspaper and the author of several books on the history of York County, Pa.

With this book, numerous primary sources – newspaper accounts, letters, diaries, even oral histories – are brought together to tell the story of York County in south-central PA, where North meets South at the Pennsylvania and Maryland border. It’s an interesting and revealing collection of stories and anecdotes, just the thing for folks interested in the Gettysburg Campaign in particular but also in how the war affected this unique community.

New Release: Scott Mingus, “Flames Beyond Gettysburg”

Yesterday’s mail brought the new Savas Beatie edition of Scott Mingus’s Flames Beyond Gettysburg: The Confederate Expedition to the Susquehanna River, June 1863.  Originally this was published in 2009 with the subtitle The Gordon Expedition, June 1863.  But be not fooled – this is a completely revised edition with new maps and photos. Scott is a long time Gettysburg geek and miniature wargamer and an e-quaintance for a number of years, and I know he worked long and hard to get this book written and published. See Scott’s website for the book here, and see his wargaming blog here.

The book is 338 pages of text, with various appendices including a chronology (I think a chronology is as essential as Orders of Battle, which this book also has), and driving tours.  Scott consulted a number of manuscript sources and newspapers in researching Flames. Footnotes are honest-to-God footnotes.

From the back cover:

…a study of a fascinating but largely overlooked operation by part of Richard Ewell’s Second Corps in June 1863 that not only shaped the course of the Gettysburg Campaign, but may well have altered the course of our nation’s history.