I've learned a lot from @CivilWarMonitor, but it's disappointing that the five (all men) historians named 14 male authors and no women in their best of 2019 review.
So, here's a (too) short thread of some of my favorite Civil War histories by women. Add to this #twitterstorians
So, here's a (too) short thread of some of my favorite Civil War histories by women. Add to this #twitterstorians
The best Civil War book I read in 2019 was @amurrelltaylor's Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. If you don't believe me, it won damn near every prize possible: uncpress.org/book/978146964…
My new favorite synthesis of the war is Elizabeth Varon's Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War. A masterful blending of narrative verve and insightful analysis: global.oup.com/academic/produ…
Stephanie McCurry's 2019's Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War will be a pillar on readings lists for at least a generation: hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…. And, of course, Confederate Reckoning is a must-read: hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
Much of @sejr_historian's They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South takes place before the war, but the seventh chapter is so strong, this is worth buying for even the most narrowly focused Civil War specialists: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030021…
.@JGiesberg's Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality has convinced me that the war was a turning point in the history of American sexuality: uncpress.org/book/978146963…
We @AmericanYawp used a lot of material from Shauna Devine's Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science when editing the discussion of medicine and the Civil War. uncpress.org/book/978146963…
My students have gotten a lot out of Barbara A. Gannon's The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Accessible and insightful for scholars and students alike. uncpress.org/book/978146962…
I have a smart graduate student who wrote a historiography of Civil War memory, and I think she was right to give primary emphasis in her essay to Caroline Janney's Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. uncpress.org/book/978146962…
I have to highlight two great studies of the Civil War and environmental history. Erin Stewart Mauldin's Unredeemed Land global.oup.com/academic/produ… and Kathryn Shively Meier's Nature's Civil War Virginia uncpress.org/book/978146962…
And of course environmental histories of the war must connect environmental change with lived experience and no one does that better than @megankatenelson in Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War ugapress.org/book/978082034…
Next year's list must do better. I, for one, can't wait to read Thavolia Glymph's The Women's Fight, LeAnna Keith's When It Was Grand, @HC_Richardson's How the South Won the Civil War, and @megankatenelson The Three-Cornered War. 2020 will be a boon for CW scholarship.
