Bibliography of the American Civil War

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The bibliography of the American Civil War comprises books that deal in large part with the American Civil War. There are over 60,000 books on the war, with more appearing each month.[1] Authors James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier stated in 2012, "No event in American history has been so thoroughly studied, not merely by historians, but by tens of thousands of other Americans who have made the war their hobby. Perhaps a hundred thousand books have been published about the Civil War."[2]

There is no complete bibliography to the war; the largest guide to books is more than 50 years old and lists over 6,000 of the most valuable titles as evaluated by three leading scholars.[3] Many specialized topics such as Abraham Lincoln,[4] women,[5] and medicine[6] have their own lengthy bibliographies. The books on major campaigns typically contain their own specialized guides to the sources and literature. The most comprehensive guide to the historiography annotates over a thousand major titles, with an emphasis on military topics.[7] The most recent guide to literary and non-military topics is A History of American Civil War Literature (2016) edited by Coleman Hutchison. It emphasizes cultural studies, memory, diaries, southern literary writings, and famous novelists.[8]

Causes of the war

Secession

  • Adams, Charles. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
  • Bledose, Alfred T. Is Davis a Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War in 1861?. Baltimore, Maryland: Innes and the author, 1866.
  • Dew, Charles B. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.
  • Mississippi Secession Convention. Journal of the State Convention and Ordinances and Resolution Adopted in January 1861, with an Appendix. Jackson, Mississippi: E. Barksdale, 1861.
  • Potter, David M. Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. (1962) [1942].
  • Sitterson, Joseph Carlyle. The Secession Movement in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939.
  • Stampp, Kenneth M. And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861. 1950.
  • Wakelyn, Jon L., editor. Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860 – April 1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

American Civil War battles and campaigns

Naval history

Ironclads

University of South Carolina Press, 1985, 1988. . Originally published Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971.

Confederate raiders

Unit histories

Union military units

Confederate military units

Strategy and command

Technology, weapons, logistics

Reconstruction

  • See
    Reconstruction: Bibliography
    for complete guide

Medical

Primary sources

Constitutional and legal

Slavery and emancipation

  • Belz, Herman. Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (1978)
  • Biddle, Daniel R., and Murray Dubin. "'God Is Settling the Account': African American Reaction to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation", Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (Jan. 2013) 137#1 57–78.
  • Blair, William A., and Younger, Karen Fisher, eds. Lincoln's Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
  • Blight, David W. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom: Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.
  • Chambers Jr., Henry L. "Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Executive Power." Maryland Law Review 73 (2013): 100+ online
  • Durden, Robert Franklin
    . The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.
  • Fehrenbacher, Don Edward. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  • Foner, Eric. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011.
  • Guelzo, Allen C. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in American. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
  • Harrold, Stanley. Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
  • Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams. The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (2006)
  • Huston, James L. Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
  • Lightner, David L. Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
  • Masur, Louis P. Lincoln's Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union. Harvard University Press, 2012.
  • Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863. Scribner, 1959.
  • Mitchell, Charles W., ed. Maryland Voices of the Civil War. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
  • Mohr, Clarence L. On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.
  • Morrison, Michael A. Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
  • Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
  • Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
  • Reynolds, David S. Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
  • Russo, Peggy A. and Finkelman, Paul, eds. Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown. Ohio University Press, 2005.
  • Siddali, Silvana R. From Property to Person: Slavery and the Confiscation Acts, 1861–1862. LSU Press, 2005.
  • Trefousse, Hans L., edited by Harold M. Hyman. Lincoln's Decision for Emancipation. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1975.
  • Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001)
  • Vorenberg, Michael, ed. The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (2010), primary and secondary sources

International affairs

Collected biographies

  • Bowman, John S. Who Was Who in the Civil War. (Random House, 1994).
  • Hubbell, John T. Biographical Dictionary of the Union: Northern Leaders of the Civil War. (Greenwood, 1995).
  • McNeese, Tim. Civil War Leaders (Infobase Publishing, 2009) Popular history.
  • Ritter, Charles F., and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., Leaders of the American Civil War: A Biographical and Historiographical Dictionary (1998) short biographies and valuable historiographical summaries.
  • Sifakis, Stewart. Who was Who in the Union: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Biographical Reference to More Than 1,500 of the Principal Union Participants in the Civil War (Facts on File, 1988).
  • Sifakis, Stewart. Who Was Who in the Civil War: A comprehensive, illustrated biographical reference to more than 2,500 of the principal Union and Confederate participants in the War Between the States (2014), 780 pp
  • Sifakis, Stewart. Who was Who in the Confederacy: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Biographical Reference to More Than 1,000 of the Principal Confederacy Participants in the Civil War (Facts on File, 1988).
  • Spencer, James. Civil War Generals: Categorical Listings and a Biographical Directory (Greenwood, 1986).

Military leaders

Soldiers and sailors

Prisoners

Violence and death

  • Carmichael, Peter S. The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (2018) excerpt
  • Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) excerpt
  • Hacker, J. David. "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead" Civil War History 57.4 (2011): 307–348.
  • Hacker, J. David. "Has the Demographic Impact of Civil War Deaths Been Exaggerated?." Civil War History 60.4 (2014): 453–458 excerpt
  • Marshall, Nicholas. "The Great Exaggeration: Death and the Civil War" Journal of the Civil War Era 4#1 (2014) pp. 3–27 online
  • Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (UP of Kansas, 2016) online.
  • Schantz, Mark S. Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death (Cornell UP, 2008).
  • Scott, Sean A. "'Earth Has No Sorrow That Heaven Cannot Cure': Northern Civilian Perspectives on Death and Eternity during the Civil War," Journal of Social History (2008). 41#4:843–866 online
  • Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2018). pp. 465. excerpt also online review
  • Steplyk, Jonathan M. Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat (UP of Kansas, 2018) online
  • Sutherland, Daniel E. Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (U of Arkansas Press, 2009).
  • Swanson, David A., and Richard Verdugo. "The Civil War’s Demographic Impact on White Males in Mississippi." Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences 62#3 (2017) : 309+ oneline.

Homefront

States, regions, and local

Guerillas

Ethnic groups

African Americans

  • Barrow, Charles Kelly, J.H. Segars, and R.B. Rosenburg, editors. Forgotten Confederates: An Anthology about Black Southerners. Murfreesboro, Tennessee: Southern Heritage Press, 1995.
  • Bergeron, Arthur W. and Richard M. Rollins. Black Southerners in Gray: Essays on Afro-Americans in Confederate Armies. Rank and File Publications, 1994.
  • Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Blatt, Martin H., Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone, editors. Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
  • Brown, William Wlls. The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity, edited by John D. Smith. Athen: Ohio University Press, 2003.
  • Burchard, Peter. One Gallant Rush: Robert Gould Shaw and His Brave Black Regiment. New York: St. Martin's, 1965.
  • Cimprich, John. Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
  • Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987.
  • Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Durden, Robert Franklin. The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
  • Gannon, Barbarra A. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill,
University of North Carolina Press, 2011. .

Primary sources

  • Adair, Lyle, and Glenn Robins. They Have Left Us Here to Die: The Civil War Prison Diary of Sgt. Lyle Adair, 111th U.S. Colored Infantry. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2011.

American Indians

Primary sources

  • Baird, W. David, editor. A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief G.W. Greyson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
  • Edwards, Whit. "The Prairie Was on Fire": Eyewitness Accounts of the Civil War in the Indian Territory. Oklahoma Historical Society, 2001.
  • Hauptman, Laurence M., ed. A Seneca Indian in the Union Army: The Letters of Sergeant Isaac Newton Parker. Columbia, Maryland: White Mane Publishing Co., 1995.
  • Moulton, Gary E., ed. The Papers of John Ross, two volumes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Women

National

North

  • Anderson, J. L. "The Vacant Chair on the Farm: Soldier Husbands, Farm Wives, and the Iowa Home Front, 1861–1865," Annals of Iowa (2007) 66: 241–265
  • Attie, Jeanie. "Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War." Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
  • Bahde, Thomas. "'I never wood git tired of wrighting to you.'" Journal of Illinois History, 2009. 12:129–155
  • Fleischner, Jennifer. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.
  • Gallman, Matthew J. Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • Gallman, Matthew J, America's Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Giesberg, Judith. Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
  • Hall, Richard. Patriots in Disguise. New York: Paragon House, 1993.
  • Marten, James. Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front. Ivan R. Dee, 2004.
  • Scott, Sean A. "'Earth Has No Sorrow That Heaven Cannot Cure': Northern Civilian Perspectives on Death and Eternity during the Civil War," Journal of Social History, 2008. 41:843–866
  • Silber, Nina. Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War. Harvard University Press, 2005.
  • Smith, Michael T. "The Beast Unleashed: Benjamin F. Butler and Conceptions of Masculinity in the Civil War North." New England Quarterly 2006 79(2): 248–276.
    ISSN 0028-4866
  • Venet, Wendy Hamand. A Strong-Minded Woman: The Life of Mary Livermore. University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.

Black South

White South

Primary sources

Ideology, rhetoric, religion

Veterans

Historiography

Surveys and reference books

  1. John G. Nicolay
    (1881), The Outbreak of Rebellion, reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1995.
  2. Manning Force
    (1881), From Fort Henry to Corinth.
  3. Alexander S. Webb (1881), The Peninsular: McClellan's Campaign of 1862.
  4. John Codman Ropes (1881), The Army under Pope.
  5. James Russell Soley
    (1883), The Blockade and the Cruisers.
  6. Francis Winthrop Palfrey (1885), The Antietam and Fredericksburg, reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1996.
  7. Abner Doubleday (1882), Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, reprints, New York: Da Capo, 1994, and Saint Petersburg, FL: Red and Black, 2009.
  8. Henry M. Cist (1882), The Army of the Cumberland.
  9. Francis Vinton Greene (1882), The Mississippi.
  10. Daniel Ammen (1883), The Atlantic Coast.
  11. Jacob Dolson Cox (1882), Atlanta, reprint, retitled as Sherman's Battle for Atlanta, New York: Da Capo, 1994.
  12. Jacob Dolson Cox, (1882), The March to the Sea, Franklin and Nashville, reprint, retitled as Sherman's March to the Sea, Hood's Tennessee Campaign and the Carolina Campaigns of 1865, New York: Da Capo, 1994.
  13. George Edward Pond (1882), The Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
  14. Andrew A. Humphreys (1883), The Virginia Campaign of '64 and '65: The Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James, reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1995.
  15. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1883), The Gulf and Inland Waters.
  1. .
  2. .
  3. .
  1. .
  2. .
  3. .
  1. From Sumter to Shiloh.
  2. North to Antietam.
  3. Retreat from Gettysburg.
  4. The Way to Appomattox.
  1. Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852
  2. A House Dividing, 1852–1857
  3. Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859
  4. Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861
  5. The Improvised War, 1861–1862
  6. War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863
  7. The Organized War, 1863–1864
  8. The Organized War to Victory, 1864–1865

For the most recent surveys see:

Maps, photographs, environment

  1. Volume I: Shadows of the storm.. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981. .
  2. Volume II: The Guns of '62. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1982. .
  3. Volume III: The Embattled Confederacy. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1982. .
  4. Volume IV: Fighting for Time. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983. .
  5. Volume V: The South Besieged. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983. .
  6. Volume VI: The End of an Era. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984. .
  • Davis, William C., William A. Frassanito and The National Historical Society. Touched by Fire: A Photographic Portrait of the Civil War. 2 volumes. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1985–1986.
  1. .
  2. .

Bibliographies

Newspapers in the Civil War

  • The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004.
  • Andrews, J. Cutler. The North Reports the Civil War. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955.
  • Andrews, J. Cutler. The South Reports the Civil War. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970.
  • Cortissoz, Royal. The Life of Whitelaw Reid, two volumes. New York: Scribners, 1921.
  • Harris, Brayton. War News Blue and Gray in Black and White: Newspapers in the Civil War.
  • Holzer, Harold. Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
  • Holzer, Harold, and Craig L. Symonds, editors. The New York Times Complete Civil War 1861–1865. New York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2010.
  • Marszalek, John F. Sherman's Other War: The General and the Civil War Press. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999.
  • Munson, E.B., ed. Confederate Correspondent: The Civil War Reports of Jacob Nathaniel Raymer, Fourth North Carolina. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, 2009.
  • Perry, James M. A Bohemian Brigade: The Civil War Correspondents – Mostly Rough, Sometimes Ready. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000.
  • Reynolds, Donald F. Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966.
  • Smart, James G., ed. A Radical View: The "Agate" Dispatches of Whitelaw Reid, 1861–1865, two volumes. Memphis, Tennessee: Memphis State University Press, 1976
  • Starr, Louis M. Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952.
  • Stepp, John W. and I. William Hill, eds. and comps. Mirror of the War: The Washington Star Reports the Civil War. New York: Castle Books for The Evening Star Newspapers Company, 1961.
  • Styple, William B. Writing & Fighting the Confederate War: The Letters of Peter Wellington Alexander, Confederate War Correspondent. Kearny, New Jersey: Belle Grove Publishing, 2002.

Art and music

  • Cornelius, Steven H. Music of the Civil War Era. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2004.
  • Davis, James A. Music Along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music, and Community during Winter Quarters, Virginia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
  • Mark E. Neely, Jr.
    Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art. New York: Orion Books, 1993.
  • Jacobson, Doranne. The Civil War in Art: A Visual Odyssey. New York: SMITHMARK Publishers, 1996.
  • Kelley, Bruce and Mark A. Snell. Bugle Resounding: Music and Musicians of the Civil War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.
  • Neely, Jr., Mark E., Harold Holzer, and
    Gabor S. Boritt
    . The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
  • Sharp, Kevin, with contributions by Adam M. Thomas. Bold Cautious True: Walt WHitman and American Art of the Civil War Era. Memphis, Tennessee: The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2009.
  • Zapata-Rodríguez, Melisa M. (2016). "Minstresy: Iconography of Resistance During the American Civil War". Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography. 41 (1–2): 111–127.
    ISSN 1522-7464
    .

Popular culture, novels, films

Tour guides

Monuments, battlefields, and battlefield preservation

Government publications

Primary sources

Memoirs

Other

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.
University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ In 2001, Jonathan Sarna estimated that over 50,000 books had already appeared, with 1,500 more appearing annually. American Jewish History 89.3 (2001) 335–337.
  2. .
  3. ^ Allan Nevins, Bell Irvin Wiley, and James I. Robertson, Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography (2 vol, 1970)
  4. ^ Burkhimer, Michael. 100 Essential Lincoln Books (2003)
  5. ^ McDevitt, Theresa. Women and the American Civil War: An Annotated Bibliography (2003)
  6. ^ Freemon, Frank R. Microbes and Minie Balls (1993)
  7. ^ Woodworth, Steven; et al., eds. The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research (1996)
  8. ^ See online edition at Google.com

Further reading

For a guide to the bibliography see:

  • Woodworth, Steven E.; ed. The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research. Greenwood Press, 1996.
  • Eicher, David J. The Civil War in Books An Analytical Bibliography. 1997.
  • Murdock, Eugene C. Civil War in the North: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography. Garland, 1987.
  • Sheehan-Dean, ed., Aaron (2014). A Companion to the U.S. Civil War (2 vol. 2014) comprehensive 98 page bibliography is online free

For a guide to web sources see:

  • Carter, Alice E.; Jensen, Richard. The Civil War on the Web: A Guide to the Very Best Sites – Completely Revised and Updated. 2003.

For an older short survey that is online and won the Pulitzer Prize (1918), see: