1 comments about The Capture of Atlanta and the March to the Sea: From Sherman's Memoirs (Dover Books on Americana).

1. The story of the March in the words of the Commanding General himself. Doing reading on the subject for around four months I decided to pick up a book by him about his own March. His side of the story does often go along with what Historians have to say about him. Unlike any major Historian (that I've found) will do, he actually tells you why he made some of his major decisions.
   
   It does take some getting used to, because it's written in the era's form of English and writting.. and you will pick up on the differences very quickly, but you get used to it. For "old and ancient" writing.. I found it to be a very well written and put together book, despite the fact that the March to the Sea is the last chapter of the book (and also the last 70ish pages).

1 comments about My Story Of The War: The Civil War Memoirs Of The Famous Nurse, Relief Organizer, And Suffragette.

1. Suffragette was a deragatory term used by the press, when the correct term was Suffragist.

No comments about Into The Mouth of The Cannon: A Historical Biography of the 18th Arkansas Infantry and the Civil War in the Western Theater from 1861 to 1863.

1 comments about From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln's Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865.

1. From Rail-Splitter to Icon is a unique and fascinating contribution to our understanding of how Lincoln was judged by the press, both here, North and South, and abroad. Through dogged and meticulous research, Bunker has combed the country for magazines largely judged ephemeral at the time but that now loom large in our understanding of popular culture -- those that featured humor and political cartoons. In this handsome book, he assesses their content and pictures nearly 200 of the Lincoln images under discussion, most of which have never been reprinted. Bunker's book easily surpasses all of the other books devoted to Lincoln in caricature [Walsh. Lincoln and the London Punch (1909); Shaw. A Cartoon History of Abraham Lincoln (1930) (which ends inexplicably in 1861); and Rockwell. Lincoln in Caricature (1946) (which is a book of plates with extended captions)] because Bunker's survey of the field is comprehensive, when the others were selective, and his historical analysis is fully informed by several generations of important Lincoln scholarship. This groundbreaking book is surely a candidate for awards. Highly recommended.

1 comments about Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Civil War America).

1. Letters from German immigrants who fought in the American Civil War, estimated at 200,000, are rare, so this book is a welcome addition to Civil War literature and shows that Germans were not a monolithic group but held various political, religious and other views. It also gives battle descriptions and descriptions of the hardships of being a Civil War soldier. Germans' pride and prejudices are clearly revealed. A terrific and much needed volume on a much neglectected group in the nation's greatest conflict.

5 comments about Balkan Odyssey (Harvest Book).

1. David Owen gives a very personal account of his experiences as a mediator, including his frustrations with the attitude of the international community (in particular the US). His views are very useful to understand the mechanisms of international diplomacy in a highly mediatised conflict. It is rather simplistic, in my view, to depict Owen as someone who tried to favorise one one the parties in the conflict.



2. This is by far one of the worst books about war in Bosnia.
   It's a complete waste of time.



3. Lord Owen is clearly getting brickbats for being "pro Serb" (he has said as a witness to Milosevic's "trial" that he was the only leader who consistently supported peace & that any form of racism was "anathema" to him). On the other hand nobody points out any factual errors. One reviewer refers to Fikret Abdic as a smuggler when, as a matter of fact, he was the most popular moslem politician & Bosnia who had clearly beaten Izetbegovic in a straight election.
   
   If the facts prove that the Croatian & Moslem Nazis were genocidal nazis, as they do, it would be wrong to say otherwise. On the other hand Lord Owen would hardly have been criticised had he lied to uphold the cover story of the genocidal western leaders who supported them.



4. Horrible book from the person who has no right to even talk about the war in Bosnia, since he himself was indirectly responsible for prolonging it. I would strongly recommend a book by Brendan Simms "Unfinest Hour - Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia" that clarifies Owen's role during the war in Bosnia.



5. Lord Owen's recounting of his efforts to help resolve the Bosnian war is really little more than a list of meetings and conferences. To this dry unending litany he adds a few cursory and, in some cases, inaccurate descriptions of players associated with the conflict. If you are hoping to get insight from a seemingly well placed person who spent hours and days locked in discussion with some of the 20th Century's most reviled figures you will not find it here. His descriptions are little more than ambiguous diplomatic niceties. During the course of this confusing peace process, Owen only occasionally pens restrained displeasure about the continued obstructionism of American administrations and the blatant deception of Balkan leaders. Just as the international community feared backlash against any form of decisive action, it seems Lord Owen had similar reservations about libel - neither approach is conducive to establishing lasting peace nor fruitful discourse. Owen's isolation in conference rooms and hotels quickly becomes apparent as his detached, incomplete descriptions of realities on the ground appear more like secondhand gossip than any useful form of analysis.

   In this book, Lord Owen missed a glorious opportunity to expose the countess agendas and duplicities he faced from all sides. He could have spoken his mind but instead chose to remain a politician. In the end, this book is really just another apology for the shameful failure of Western collective security.

No comments about The Best American History Essays on Lincoln.

No comments about Before the Manifesto: The Life Writings of Mary Lois Walker Morris (Life Writings Frontier Women).

1 comments about Lincoln and the Radicals.

1. I first read this book in graduate school twenty-five years ago, and while recently rereading it I was impressed anew with its scintillating but remarkably dated analysis. T. Harry Williams argued a very interesting thesis about Abraham Lincoln in this benchmark work in the historiography of the subject. He found that in spite of his personal antipathy toward slavery, Lincoln was moderate in his public statements because he could not afford to compromise his questionable popular base of support as president. Lincoln recognized that his administration's ability to hold the rest of the nation together in the wake of southern secession was dependent upon his walking a narrow path of acceptability to a coalition of factions with sometimes divergent beliefs upon the slavery issue, that without enough support his position as president would be undermined and he would never be able to accomplish anything worthwhile. In spite of personal desires, it was a question for Lincoln of first things first. In the end Lincoln was prompted to end slavery by executive order by radicals within his own party who pressed for emancipation.
   
   Lincoln demonstrated, according to Williams, a spirit of pragmatism. To demonstrate this he once compared government to a machine. If something goes wrong with the machine, what should one do? The reactionary might say, "Don't fool with it, you'll ruin it?" The radical might say, "It's no good, get rid of it and find a new one." The pragmatist would try to fix the machine, to remove the defective part and add a new one, but only after carefully scrutinizing the situation to ensure that his action was correct (T. Harry Williams, "Abraham Lincoln: Pragmatic Democrat," in Norman A. Graebner, ed., "The Enduring Lincoln: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Lectures at the University of Illinois" [University of Illinois Press, 1959], pp. 26 27).
   
   In this book Lincoln's moderation is very much admired by Williams, while the radicals were "Jacobin" revolutionaries intent on destroying the fabric of the nation. This position essentially embraces the larger thesis present about the Civil War in the 1930s and 1940s; that it was a "repressible conflict" that could have been avoided had extremists on both sides been willing to compromise. Williams viewed the radicals as dogmatic and inflexible in dealing with a significant problem in American history, while Lincoln was a pragmatist. Such people as the radicals in Congress, led by old antislavery Whigs such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, argued for a ruthless prosecution of the war and a punishment of the South for its rebellion. They established a Committee on the Conduct of the War that pressed Lincoln daily about the aggressive prosecution of the war with Republican rather than Democratic Party generals and punishment of the South. They were all opposed to slavery but the manner in which it would be eliminated--gradually or immediately, with owners paid off or not, and the status of the freed slaves--were hotly contested. In this book Lincoln is very much a pragmatic hero and the radicals very much obstinate ideologues.
   
   More recent interpretations of Lincoln's relationship to the radicals in his party are quite different from what Williams believed. Hans L. Trefousse argued in "The Radical Republicans" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969) that they were Lincoln's vanguard for racial justice. They served as lightning rods for the antislavery agenda that Lincoln and all members of his party agreed upon. Having been elected to Congress from districts supportive of their aggressiveness, the radicals served as "blocking backs" for Lincoln and made it possible for him to move out on the abolition of slavery more readily than he would have been able to do otherwise. This is an interpretation that is more in keeping with recent trends in the historiography rather than Williams's more than 60-year-old study, but it also deserves continuing revision as new documentary materials and new perspectives on the era emerge.

No comments about The Tarnished Cavalier: Major General Earl Van Dorn, C.S.A..