Sunday, January 8, 2023

Books I Read in 2022


2022 came with plenty of change: a new job, a new place to live, and new opportunities to learn. However, as always, I'm thankful for the ability to continue to have access to books and the time to read them. 

Here's my list of books that I read this year. I've highlighted those I found particularly interesting or insightful:

1. The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, edited by John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd

2. Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland, edited by Michael E. Birdwell and W. Calvin Dickinson

3. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family's Keepsake by Tiya Miles

4. A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens, edited by Donald Yacovone 

5. Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski

6. Sweet Freedom's Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails, 1841-1869 by Shirley Ann Wilson Moore

7. A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

8. Shook Over Hell: Post Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War by Eric T. Dean

9. Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea

10. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner

11. Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

12. On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters from the Front, edited by Virginia M. Adams

13. If It Takes All Summer: The Battle of Spotsylvania by William D. Matter

14. That Furious Struggle: Chancellorsville and the High Tide of the Confederacy by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White

15. Gone for a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Pvt. Alfred Bellard, edited by David Herbert Donald

16. Chancellorsville's Forgotten Front: The Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church, May 3, 1863 by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White

17. Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman, edited by Jerome M. Loving

18. Fighting the Second Civil War: A History of Battlefield Preservation and the Emergence of the Civil War Trust by Bob Zeller

19. Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg, Dec. 13, 1862 by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White

20. Black Warriors: The Buffalo Soldiers of WWII by Ivan J. Houston

21. A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864 by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White

22. Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861-2015 by Timothy B. Smith

23. The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock by Francis Augustin O'Reilly

24. Radical Sacrifice: The Rise and Ruin of Fitz John Porter by William Marvel

25. Brothers One and All: Esprit de Corps in a Civil War Regiment by Mark H. Dunkelman

26. Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr.

27. Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac by Frank Wilkeson

28. Voices of the 55th: Letters from the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers, 1861-1865, edited by Noah Andre Trudeau

29. Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life by Elizabeth Leonard

30. The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers' Struggle for Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle by Jeffry D. Wert

31. Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory by Christian B. Keller

32. The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice by Holly Pinheiro, Jr.

33. A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee by John Reeves

34. Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule

35. Lee and Jackson's Bloody Twelfth: The Letters of Irby G. Scott, 12th Georgia, edited by Johnnie Perry Pearson

36. Dear Friends at Home: The Civil War Letters and Dairies of Sgt. Charles T. Bowen, 12th U.S. Infantry, 1861-1864, edited by Edward K. Cassady

37. Far Far From Home: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson, 3rd South Carolina Volunteers, edited by Guy R. Everson and Edward H. Simpson, Jr.

38. Gone for a Sojer Boy: The Revealing Letters and Diaries of Union Soldiers in the Civil War, edited by Neal E. Wixon

39. The Hour of Our Nation's Agony: The Civil War Letters of William C.  Nelson of Mississippi, edited by Jennifer W. Ford

40. Dear Delia: The Civil War Letters of Captain Henry F. Young, Seventh Wisconsin Infantry, edited by Michael J. Larson and John David Smith

41. A South Carolina Upcountry Saga: The Civil War Letters of Barham Bobo Foster and His Family, 1860-1863, edited by A. Gilbert Kennedy

42. My Dear Wife: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Capt. John Quigley, edited by Julie Wyckoff

43. Theas Few Lines: The Civil War Letters of Pvt. Alonzo Bump, 77th New York Infantry, edited by David Allen Handy

44. Dearest Sattie: Civil War Letters of Captain Charles Oren, 5th U.S.C.T., edited by Tim Oren

45. Campaigning with Old Stonewall: Confederate Captain Ujanirtis Allen's Letters to His Wife, edited by Randall Allen and Keith S. Bohannan

46. Alonzo's War: Letters from a Young Civil War Soldier, edited by Mary Searing O'Shaughnessy

47. Letters to Eliza From a Union Soldier, 1862-1865, edited by Margery GreenLeaf

48. Army Life in Virginia: The Civil War Letters of George G. Benedict, edited by Eric Ward

49. Fallen Leaves: The Civil War Letters of Maj. Henry Livermore Abbott, edited Robert Garth Scott

50. My Life in the Irish Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of Pvt. William McCarter, 116th Pennsylvania, edited by Kevin O'Brien

51. Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 by Cheryl A. Wells

52. Gettysburg's Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond by Hampton Newsome

53. Music Along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music, and Community during Winter Quarters by James A. Davis

54. Decisions at Fredericksburg: Fourteen Critical Decisions that Defined the Battle by Chris Mackowski

55. Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund Dewitt Patterson, edited by John G. Barrett

56. Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North by Crystal Lynn Webster

57. Black Cloud Rising: A Novel by David Wright Falade

58. The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight Over Truth at he Dawn of Reconstruction by William A. Blair

59. Race and Radicalism in the Union Army by Mark A, Lause

Happy reading in 2023!