When his captain was killed during the Battle of Perryville, John Calvin Hartzell was made commander of Company H, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He led his men during the Battle of Chickamauga, the siege of Chattanooga, and the Battle of Missionary Ridge. Edited and introduced by Charles Switzer, Ohio Volunteer: The Childhood and Civil War Memoirs of Captain John Calvin Hartzell, OVI documents military strategy, the life of the common soldier, the intense excitement and terror of battle, and the wretchedness of the wounded.

Hartzell’s family implored him to set down his life story, including his experiences in the Civil War from 1862 to 1866. Hartzell did so diligently, taking more than two years to complete his manuscript. The memoir reveals a remarkable memory for vivid details, the ability to see larger and more philosophical perspectives, and a humorous outlook that helped him bear the unbearable.

He also depicted the changing rural economy, the assimilation of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and the transformations wrought by coal mining and the iron industry. Hartzell felt individualism was threatened by the Industrial Revolution and the cruelties of the war. He found his faith in humanity affirmed—and the dramatic tension in his memoir resolved—when 136,000 Union soldiers reenlisted and assured victory for the North. The common soldier, he wrote, was “loyal to the core.”

From 1862 to 1865, twenty-six hundred miles away from the seat of the federal government in Washington, DC, the First Oregon Volunteer Cavalry Regiment offered aid to the Union cause in the American Civil War. The First Oregon Cavalry confronted a host of complex challenges unseen by their counterparts serving in a more traditional role in the East. Their battles were more often with Native Americans—and often more concerned with their own status in the territory than with the Civil War rending the nation—while searching for pro Confederate spies and sympathizers. However unsung during the war, the regiment carried out their responsibilities successfully, managing to expedite the development of the Pacific Northwest in the process. 

On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War introduces readers to the first regiment from the Pacific Northwest to serve the Union cause. James Robbins Jewell offers a glimpse into the lives of these soldiers, presenting their wartime letters to various northwesterners to share their experiences with loved ones at home. 

Complete with a series of reminiscences and excerpts from memoirs by First Oregon Cavalry officers and soldiers, On Duty in the Pacific Northwest during the Civil War is the first collection of primary source materials from soldiers serving in this Far Western territory. Jewell’s first-rate collection enables readers to step directly into the Pacific Northwest of the early 1860s and experience the Civil War from a different perspective. 
 

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

What kind of relationship exists between wars and epidemics? It is widely held that epidemics affected the outcomes of many wars and, until World War II, more victims of war died of disease than of battle wounds. Many disease vectors are present in times of conflict, including mass movements of people across borders and increased contact between persons of different geographic regions, yet disease is rarely treated in depth in histories of war.

Hikmet Özdemir’s The Ottoman Army, 1914–1918 provides extensive documentation of disease and death across the Ottoman Empire during World War I, when epidemic diseases annihilated armies and caused civilians to perish en masse. Drawing on hospital records and information on regional disease prevalence, Özdemir examines the effects that disease and epidemic had on the outcome of the war.

The information on disease mortality explains much that has never been properly understood about wartime events and government actions, events that only begin to make sense when the disease factor is considered. Rich in detail, this is an extremely valuable book that illuminates a facet of the war that has not been adequately considered until now.

“Let our citizens organize and drill,” urged the editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette in September 1862 as rumors of a Confederate attack on the North grew louder. Bank president John Harper, chair of the city’s Committee of Home Defense, confirmed Pittsburgh was ready to repel any raid: “Our people . . . are warlike,” he averred. The Keystone State played an indispensable role in the Federal war effort, and Pittsburgh does not fit the common “brother-on-brother” historiographical theme, which emphasizes divided loyalties between Federal and Confederate supporters. This volume argues that overwhelmingly pro-Union fervor—which cut across class, ethnic, and gender lines—mobilized the city for the war effort.

From its establishment as a frontier village, Pittsburgh evolved on a cultural path divergent from that of both the Northeast and the towns developing farther west. The city entered the war with close economic ties to the East, West, and South, yet also stood apart from them—too small to assume the political positions of cities like New York or Philadelphia that represented greater ethnic and class conflict and much greater tension over secession—yet large enough to manifest the complex institutions and systems of an urban center.

This book represents a significant contribution to the scholarship of both the Civil War and the city of Pittsburgh, adding to the growing historiography of regional and community studies of the war. With abundant illustrations of local people and places, research on Pittsburgh’s geographic importance and extensive industrial output, this book also provides compelling details on Black citizens’ efforts to oppose slavery, ultimately through their service in the Union Army. Civil War Pittsburgh was unique: its distinctive geography, politics, and economy set the conditions for ordinary citizens to directly participate in the war in myriad ways that connected the experiences of the battlefield and the home front.