Civil War, Military

Wartime impact and involvement

Astor, Aaron. 2015. The Civil War Along Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 192 pp.

Bailey, Kenneth R. 2013. “Test Oaths, Belligerent Rights, and Confederate Money: Civil War Lawsuits Before the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.” West Virginia History, n.s. 7, no. 1 (Spring): 1-22.

Bair, Sarah. 2015. “Continuing to Pay the ‘Patriotic Debt’: The Establishment of the Pennsylvania Soldiers’ Orphans Industrial School, 1893-1912.” Pennsylvania History 82, no. 4 (Autumn): 460-488. “... to consolidate under one facility the thirty-year-old program for the care and education of Civil War orphans in the state,” near Chambersburg, Franklin Co.

Baker, Bruce E. 2013. “Drovers, Distillers, and Democrats: Economic and Political Change in Northern Greenville County, 1865-1878 [S.C.]. Chap. 8 in After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, ed. B. Baker and B. Kelly, 159-175. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Baker, John Rudolph. 2015. “Brothers In Arms: Witness to D-Day.” Interview by Eric Dyer and Ross Lunsford. Foxfire Magazine 49, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer): 4-17. Ninety-three-year-old Baker of Gainesville, Ga., shares his experience of the 1944 Normandy invasion.

Belt, Gordon T., and Traci Nichols-Belt. 2014. John Sevier: Tennessee’s First Hero [1745-1815]. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 224 pp. Soldier, frontiersman, and governor (1796).

Blackmon, Richard. 2014. The Creek War, 1813-1814. CMH Publication, no. 74-4. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army. 43 pp. http://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo53888.

Bluhm, Raymond K. 2014. The Shenandoah Valley Campaign: March-November 1864. Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army. 55 pp. http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/gpo52118/cmhPub_75-14.pdf.

Butkovich, Brad. 2013. The Battle of Pickett’s Mill: Along the Dead-Line. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 205 pp. Paulding County, Ga.; May 27, 1864; a defeat for Union Gen. Sherman.

Byrd, Rebecca. 2013. “Supporting and Tempering Distant Forces: The World War II Experience of Chestnut Hill, Tennessee” [Jefferson Co.]. Journal of East Tennessee History 85: 70-89. Pearl Harbor attack, TVA dam building program, blackouts, school drills, rationing, scrap metal drives, women workers and men away serving in the military.

Cale, Clyde. 2013. Gray Days in Morgantown: The Story of the Great Confederate Civil War Raid on Morgantown, Virginia (West Virginia), April 27 and 28, 1863 [“Jones-Imboden Raid”]. Morgantown, W. Va.: Monongalia Historical Society. 111 pp. Morgantown is home to present-day West Virginia University.

Callahan, Brandon. 2013. “The Life and Opinions of an American Hero” [Rabun Co., Ga.]. Interview by Jack Blackstock. Foxfire Magazine 47, no. 3-4 (Fall-Winter): 69-79. Account, from a hometown Marine recruit, about his military experience in Afghanistan.

Cassel, Melissa. 2013. Battle of Philippi, Virginia (West Virginia) June 2-3, 1861. West Conshohocken, Pa.: Infinity Publishing. 18 pp.

Casto, James E. 2016. “West Virginians on the Mexican Border a Century Ago.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 42, no. 1 (Spring): 64-67. “National Guardsmen from Camp Kanawha are deployed to protect Texas from Pancho Villa” (1916-17).

Civil Wars in Appalachia. 2014. “Special issue, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 30, no. 1 (Summer): 1-64. Musings, essays, photos, and poems. “As the nation observes the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War, we devote this issue of Now & Then to...exploring themes of conflict and resolution, transgression and atonement, division and reconciliation in the war-scarred landscape of Appalachia.”

DeCaro, Louis A. 2015. Freedom’s Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. 451 pp. Focuses on Brown’s last six weeks, between his arrest and execution in Harpers Ferry, (W.)Va.

Dietle, Lannie. 2016. “Captain Petrie’s Iron Clads.” Journal of the Alleghenies 52: 44-63. The author’s ancestor, Chrisitian Petenbrink, enlisted in 1863 with Company K of the Maryland Volunteers which fought from armored railroad cars called “iron clads.” This article is about two battles fought guarding the B&O railroad from New Creek (now Keyser, W. Va.) to Cumberland, Md.

Donohoe, Patricia A., ed., and Will Tomlinson. 2014. The Printer’s Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family. Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press. 300 pp. Abolitionist Ripley, Ohio; 1844-1864.

Emmons, Louisa, ed. 2015. Civil War Voices from Western North Carolina: Letters from the Battlefield and the Home Front. Morganton, N.C.: Hollow Tree Press. 217 pp. Primary documents; ten counties.

Essington, Meghan. 2014. “Memory, Manhood, and Military Service: Gentlemen and Common Planters in the Battle of King’s Mountain” [S.C.; 1780]. Journal of East Tennessee History 86: 2-17. “...focuses on the conceptions of manhood in frontier communities and its role in the victory of patriots against the British and Tory army.”

Freeman, Lindsey A. 2015. Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 234 pp. “Tucked into the folds of Appalachia and kept off all commercial maps, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created for the Manhattan Project by the U.S. government in the 1940s. Its workers labored at a breakneck pace, most aware only that their jobs were helping ‘the war effort’. ”

Frisby, Derek W. 2014. Campaigns in Mississippi and Tennessee, February-December 1864. U.S. Army Campaigns of the Civil War series, CMH no. 75-15. Washington: Center of Military History, United States Army. 67 pp. http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/gpo55664/CMH_Pub_75-15.pdf.

Graham, Michael B. 2015. On This Day in West Virginia Civil War History. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 190 pp. Events chronology, one day at a time.

Hardy, Michael C. 2013. Watauga County, North Carolina in the Civil War. Charleston: History Press. 126 pp. “Hundreds of the county’s sons left to fight gloriously for the Confederacy. This left the area open to hordes of plundering rogues from East Tennessee, including George W. Kirk’s notorious band of thieves.” Watauga’s county seat is Boone, home to Appalachian State University.

Harris, John M. 2013. “Truthful as the Record of Heaven” [Antietam]. Southern Cultures 19, no. 3 (Fall): 79-94. “...discusses the birth of photojournalism in the U.S. The author focuses on the battle of Antietam, Maryland, in September 1862 .... photographers James F. Gibson and Alexander Gardner...were traveling with the Union army.”

Harris, Wess, comp., ed. [1977] 2014. ‘Cross the Pond: Vietnam Vets Uncensored [“Dedicated to Our Fellow Appalachians Who Never Returned to the Mountains”]. 2nd ed. Gay, W. Va.: Appalachian Community Services. 158 pp. Troubled reflections on the war experiences of 40 men.

Hassig, Ross. 2013. “The British in Pittsburgh: POWs in the War of 1812.” Pennsylvania History 80, no. 4 (Autumn): 501-518.

Hess, Earl J. 2013. Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign [1864; Cobb Co., Ga.]. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 322 pp. “...Johnston’s strategy might have been the Confederates’ best chance to halt the Federal drive toward Atlanta.”

Hulver, Richard A. 2014. “McNeill’s Rangers in the Public Memory of Hardy County, West Virginia” [guerrilla soldiers, 1862-65]. West Virginia History, n.s. 8, no. 1 (Spring): 21-38.

Inscoe, John C. 2015. “‘The Strength of the Hills’: Representations of Appalachian Wilderness as Civil War Refuge.” Chap.6 in The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, ed. B. Drake, 113-143. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Jones, Evan C., and Wiley Sword, ed. 2014. Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862-1863 [ten essays]. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 323 pp. Contents: “The funnel of the universe”: the Chattanooga country and the Civil War / Russell S. Bonds -- Last chance for a short war: Don Carlos Buell and the Chattanooga Campaign of 1862 / Gerald J. Prokopowicz -- A legend in the making: Nathan Bedford Forrest at Chickamauga / David A. Powell -- Incubator of innovation: the Army of the Cumberland and the spirit of invention in 1863 / David A. Powell -- A tale of two orders: Chickamauga, September 20, 1863 / William Glenn Robertson -- War and politics: Jefferson Davis visits the Army of Tennessee / Craig L. Symonds -- A “Malignant vindictiveness”: the two-decade rivalry between Ulysses S. Grant and William S. Rosecrans / Evan C. Jones -- “Our fireside in ruins”: consequences of the 1863 Chattanooga Campaign / Wiley Sword -- Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga, and ways to write history / Stephen Cushman -- No “Sickly sentimental gush”: Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park and the limits of reconciliation / Caroline E. Janney.

Keefer, Bradley S. 2013. Conflicting Memories on the “River of Death”: The Chickamauga Battlefield and the Spanish-American War, 1863-1933. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 406 pp. Chickamauga, September 1863: thirty-five thousand dead, wounded, or missing. When this “sacred space” was used years later as a training facility during the Spanish-American War, Union and Confederate Civil War veterans disagreed on what had transpired.

Kula, Cheryl. 2014. “To Remotest Ages.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 30, no. 1 (Summer): 35-36. Recounts the 1914 unveiling of the Confederate Soldier statue monument in Hinton, Summers County, W. Va., “dedicated to the Confederate Soldiers of Greenbrier and New River Valleys who followed Lee and Jackson.”

Lesser, W. Hunter. 2013. “Lincoln’s Odd Trick: The Strange Finale to West Virginia Statehood” [1863]. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, Special Sesquicentennial Issue (Fall): 38-40.

MacKenzie, Scott A. 2015. “Forming a Middle Class: The Civil War in Kanawha County, West(ern) Virginia 1861-1865.” West Virginia History, n.s. 9, no. 1 (Spring): 23-46.

Mastriano, Douglas V. 2014. Alvin York: A New Biography of the Hero of the Argonne. American Warriors Series. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 323 pp. Congressional Medal of Honor awardee “Alvin C. York (1887–1964)...is one of America’s most famous and celebrated soldiers. Known to generations through Gary Cooper’s Academy Award-winning portrayal in the 1941 film Sergeant York.”

Meier, Kathryn Shively. 2013. Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 219 pp. “In the Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula Campaigns of 1862, Union and Confederate soldiers faced unfamiliar and harsh environmental conditions--strange terrain, tainted water, swarms of flies and mosquitoes, interminable rain and snow storms, and oppressive heat--which contributed to escalating disease and diminished morale.”

Miller, Thurman I. 2013. Earned in Blood: My Journey from Old-Breed Marine to the Most Dangerous Job in America. New York: St. Martin’s. 275 pp. The sixteenth of eighteen children born into a W. Va. family, Miller (b. 1919) returned from WWII to work 37 years in the coal mines. Contents: West Virginia, America, 1940 | The United States Marine Corps | K/3/5 | Guadalcanal | Battle | The Matanikau | Reprieve | New Britain: Suicide Creek and Walt’s Ridge | Camp Lejeune | Into the mine | Epilogue.

Moore, George E. 2013. “The Battle of Carnifex Ferry: Succession and the War in West Virginia before September 1, 1861.” West Virginia History, n.s. 7, no. 1 (Spring): 39-74.

Nash, Steven E. 2016. Reconstruction’s Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains. Civil War America series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 272 pp. Contents: Setting the stage: antebellum and Civil War western North Carolina | Mountain masters without slaves: the aftermath of slavery, 1865-1867 | Great time for the Tories and Negroes: loyalty, race, and power, 1865-1868 | Agents of change: the Freedmen’s Bureau, 1867-1868 | Every thing that the devil can suggest: Klan violence and the Republicans’ failure, 1868-1872 | The beginning of a “new” mountain South: agriculture, railroads, and social change, 1872-1880.

Oshnock, Kevin. 2013. “The Isolation Factor: Differing Loyalties of Watauga and Buncombe Counties during the Civil War.” North Carolina Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October): 385-413. Buncombe County supported the Confederacy, and Watauga County the Union. Slave populations are also examined.

Patchan, Scott C. 2013. The Last Battle of Winchester: Phil Sheridan, Jubal Early, and the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, August 7-September 19, 1864. El Dorado Hills, Calif.: Savas Beatie. 553 pp. “It was the first time Stonewall Jackson’s former corps had ever been driven from a battlefield.”

Phillips, Jason. 2014. “Harpers Ferry Looming: A History of the Future.” Rethinking History 18, no. 1 (March): 10-27.

Prichard, James M. 2014. “Civil War Guerrilla Collections at The Filson Historical Society.” Ohio Valley History 14, no. 2 (Summer): 87-93.

Racine, Philip N. 2013. Living a Big War in a Small Place: Spartanburg, South Carolina, during the Confederacy. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. 119 pp. “Racine provides insight into these events through personal stories: the plight of a slave; the struggles of a war widow managing her husband’s farm, ten slaves, and seven children; and the trauma of a lowcountry refugee’s having to forfeit a wealthy, aristocratic way of life and being thrust into relative poverty and an alien social world.”

Rhyne, J. Michael. 2014. “‘A Blood Stained Sin’: Slavery, Freedom, and Guerrilla Warfare in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky, 1863-65.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 112, no. 4 (Autumn): 553-587.

Rockenbach, Stephen. 2013. “‘The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed’: Allegiance, Law, and White Supremacy in Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region, 1861-1865.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 111, no. 4 (Autumn): 563-589.

Scanean, Stephen J. 2014. “‘Mined’ for Its Citizens? Poverty, Opportunity Structure, and Appalachian Soldier Deaths in the Iraq War” [2003-2011]. Journal of Appalachian Studies 20, no. 1 (Spring): 43-67. Tables. Using a spatial inequality framework, the author examines the “opportunity structures” of Appalachian places from which a subset of 370 combat-dead originated.

Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. 2013. “True to the Nation: West Virginia Statehood and Union” [1862-63]. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, Special Sesquicentennial Issue (Fall): 32-35. Discusses loyalty of western Virginians to the Union during the Civil War.

Sheets, Michael. 2013. “Reliving History: Memories of a Civil War Reenactor.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 2 (Summer): 10-17.
Silver, Timothy. 2015. “Yancey County Goes to War: A Case Study of People and Nature on Home Front and Battlefield, 1861-1865” [N.C.]. Chap. 3 in The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, ed. B. Drake, 52-66. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Storie, Melanie. 2013. The Dreaded Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry: Marauding Mountain Men. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 158 pp. “...a unit composed mostly of amateur soldiers [1,400] that eventually turned undisciplined boys into seasoned fighters .... East Tennessee was torn between its Unionist tendencies and the surrounding Confederacy. The result was the persecution of the ‘home Yankees’ by Confederate sympathizers.”

Storie, Melanie. 2014. “Home Yankees and the Loyal Thirteenth” [East Tenn.]. Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 30, no. 1 (Summer): 30-33. History of the Thirteenth Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry from their throwback Overmountain Men at the 1780 Battle of Kings Mountain; persecution by the Home Guard for loyalty to the Federal government; revenge with Union General Stoneman’s raid; the defeat of Gen. John Hunt Morgan at Greeneville, Tenn.

Tarter, Brent. 2015. Daydreams & Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War. Nation Divided series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 147 pp. “... uses the private letters and other records of an Upshur County, [West] Virginia, family to reveal through their own words and experiences how the secession crisis during the winter of 1860-61 and its aftermath affected them.”

Thomas, Sarah Loudin. 2014. “Electa’s Story: A True Civil War Tale” [1864]. Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 30, no. 1 (Summer): 21-22. Sister’s heroic rescue of her wounded Union soldier brother from Confederate Franklin, Pendleton County, (West) Virginia and return to French Creek.

Thorp, Daniel B. 2013. “‘Learn your wives and daughters how to use the gun and pistol’: The Secession Crisis in Montgomery County, Virginia.” Smithfield Review 17: 75-92.

Tinnell, Shannon Colaianni. 2013. “Francis H. Pierpont: Father of West Virginia.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 2 (Summer): 24-25. “Pierpont [1814-1899] served as Governor of the Restored State of Virginia from 1861 to 1868 and was instrumental in the formation of West Virginia as the 35th state.”

Tinnell, Shannon Colaianni. 2013. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Marion County’s Civil War-Era Landmarks” [Fairmont]. Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, no. 2 (Summer): 18-23.

Vermilya, Daniel J. 2014. The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain [Ga.; 1864]. Charleston: History Press. 203 pp.

Vitale, Patrick. 2016. “Oak Ridgidness: Lindsey Freeman’s Longing for the Bomb.” Review essay of Lindsey A. Freeman’s Longing for the Bomb (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Southern Spaces, 17 May. 2,306 words, plus recommended text and web resources. Nineteen-forties Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. http://southernspaces.org/2016/oak-ridgidness-lindsey-freeman-longing-bomb.

Walker, Melissa. 2013. The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens: The American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry [S.C.; 1780-1781]. Critical Moments in American History series. New York: Routledge. 193 pp. Contents: Timeline | The Southern backcountry before the American Revolution | Imperial crisis in the South | Revolutionary War and the challenge of winning hearts and minds | The South’s first Civil War: the fall of Charles Town and its aftermath | Kings Mountain: “first link in a chain” | The Battle of Cowpens: victory for “The Flying Army” | Denouement | Documents.

We Can Do It! WWII: A Special Commemorative Issue. 2015. Western Pennsylvania History 98 (Winter): 1-103. A dozen articles include coverage of Pittsburgh’s industrial contributions to the war effort; birthplace of the Jeep; Zippo Lighters; Rosie the Riveter poster inspiration; and wartime for black Pittsburghers.

Weaver, Emily M. 2014. “Railroaded: How the DAR Saved the Fort Pitt Block House” [built 1764]. Western Pennsylvania History 97, no. 1 (Spring): 54-68. Located within Point State Park, it is Pittsburgh’s oldest building.

Welsko, Charles R. 2016. “‘Like a Dark Cloud’: Loyalty, Virtue, and War in Western Virginia, 1861-1863.” West Virginia History, n.s. 10, no. 1 (Spring): 45-68. “As western Virginians encountered the world around them through military service...they ‘mapped’ loyalty, recording mental depictions of what they encountered during the war.”

Wilder, Lucas. 2014. “Grumble’s Appalachian Cavalry Brigade.” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 30, no. 1 (Summer): 19-20. Brief history of Confederate brigade of unruly but highly effective Appalachian soldiers from southwest Va., and adjacent counties in W. Va., Ky., and Tenn., who fought under Gen. William E. Jones in Lee County, Va. and the Cumberland Gap in 1863 and 1864.

Williams, Richard G. 2013. Lexington, Virginia and the Civil War. Charleston, S.C.: History Press. 158 pp. Burial place of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and home to Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute.

Winkler, John F. 2014. Point Pleasant 1774: Prelude to the American Revolution. Illustrated by Peter Dennis. Campaign series, no. 273. Oxford [England]: Osprey Publishing. 96 pp. Profusely illustrated account of the decisive Upper Ohio Valley Battle of Point Pleasant against the Shawnee under Chief Cornstalk in what is today Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

Wolfe, Richard A. 2013. “General Kelley and the Rebel Girl.” Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 39, Special Sesquicentennial Issue (Fall): 4-7. Confederate spy Nancy Duskey; protecting the B&O Railroad.

Wolfe, Richard A. 2014. West Virginia in the Civil War [vintage photos]. Images of America series. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia. 128 pp.