This collection of essays represents the best recent history written on Civil War activity in Arkansas. It illuminates the complexity of such issues as guerrilla warfare, Union army policies, and the struggles hetween white and black civilians and soldiers, and also shows that the war years were a time of great change and personal conflict for the citizens of the state, despite the absence of "great" battles or armies. All the essays, which have been previously published in scholarly journals, have been revised to reflect recent scholarship in the field. Each selection explores a military or social dimension of the war that has been largely ignored or which is unique to the war in Arkansas—gristmill destruction, military farm colonies, nitre mining operations, mountain clan skirmishes, federal plantation experiments, and racial atrocities and reprisals. Together, the essays provoke thought on the character and cost of the war away from the great battlefields and suggest the pervasive change wrought by its destructiveness. In the cogent introduction Daniel E. Sutherland and Anne J. Bailey set the historiographic record of the Civil War in Arkansas, tracing a line from the first writings through later publications to our current understanding. As a volume in The Civil War in the West series, Civil War Arkansas elucidates little-known but significant aspects of the war, encouraging new perspectives on them and focusing on the less studied western theater. As such, it will inform and challenge both students and teachers of the American Civil War.

Anne J. Bailey has written four books, including The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood in the Autumn Campaigns of 1864 and Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Georgia in the Civil War. Currently serving as editor of the Society of Civil War Historians Newsletter and coeditor of the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series, Dr. Bailey teaches in the department of history and geography at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. A professor of history at the University of Arkansas and a nationally renowned Civil War scholar, Daniel E. Sutherland has previously published nine books, including Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Seasons of War for which he received both the Douglas Southall Freeman Award and the Laney Award.