BiblioVault - Books about Leadership

Reflections of a Civil War Historian

Essays on Leadership, Society, and the Art of War

Herman Hattaway & Foreword by Frank E. Vandiver

University of Missouri Press, 2003

Born in New Orleans, Herman Hattaway grew up in the Deep South. While it might not seem such a stretch for him to have become one of the foremost authorities on the Civil War and Southern history, Hattaway was actually at a loss for a career choice when he stumbled into the class of Professor T. Harry Williams at Louisiana State University. Williams’s lectures and writings were so inspiring to Hattaway that he became a regular in his classes, receiving his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. all under the professor’s tutelage.

This collection of essays is a compendium of Hattaway’s writings from throughout his more-than-forty-year career. He is the author or coauthor of five books that were selections of the History Book Club—Jefferson Davis: Confederate President; Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War; Why the South Lost the Civil War; How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War; and General Stephen D. Lee. He is also the author of the text for Gettysburg to Vicksburg: The Five Original Civil War Battlefield Parks.

Hattaway is a captivating historian who always seeks to engage others in the study of history. He has made many important scholarly contributions to our understanding of the Civil War, including new information on the military use of balloons, the relevance of religion in warfare, and the nature of good (and bad) military leadership. This book will appeal to the many historians and others who have been influenced by Hattaway over the years. It demonstrates how he has evolved as a historian and brings to light many essays that were never before published or published only in specialized journals.

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Renouncing the World yet Leading the Church

The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity

Andrea Sterk

Harvard University Press, 2004

Although an ascetic ideal of leadership had both classical and biblical roots, it found particularly fertile soil in the monastic fervor of the fourth through sixth centuries. Church officials were increasingly recruited from monastic communities, and the monk-bishop became the dominant model of ecclesiastical leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. In an interesting paradox, Andrea Sterk explains that "from the world-rejecting monasteries and desert hermitages of the east came many of the most powerful leaders in the church and civil society as a whole."

Sterk explores the social, political, intellectual, and theological grounding for this development. Focusing on four foundational figures--Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom--she traces the emergence of a new ideal of ecclesiastical leadership: the merging of ascetic and episcopal authority embodied in the monk-bishop. She also studies church histories, legislation, and popular ascetic and hagiographical literature to show how the ideal spread and why it eventually triumphed. The image of a monastic bishop became the convention in the Christian east.

Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church brings new understanding of asceticism, leadership, and the church in late antiquity.

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Revealing Prophets

Prophecy In Eastern African History

David M. Anderson

Ohio University Press, 1994

This book examines the richly textured histories of prophets and prophecies within East Africa. It gives an analytical account of the significantly different forms prophecy has taken over the past century across the country.

Each of the chapters takes a new look at the active dialogue between prophets and the communities whom they addressed. This dialogue continues today as the politicians and activists throughout the region still look to prophetic traditions, garnering interpretations of the past in order to provide the validation of prophetic wisdom and heroes for the present.

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