front cover of An Uncompromising Secessionist
An Uncompromising Secessionist
The Civil War of George Knox Miller, Eighth (Wade's) Confederate Cavalry
George Knox Miller, edited by Richard M. McMurry
University of Alabama Press, 2006

Offers significant insight into the life, heart, mind, and attitudes of an intelligent, educated, young mid-19th-century white Southerner

This book contains the letters of George Knox Miller who served as a line officer in the Confederate cavalry and participated in almost all of the major campaigns of the Army of Tennessee. He was, clearly, a very well-educated young man. Born in 1836 in Talladega, Alabama, he developed a great love for reading and the theater and set his sights upon getting an education that would lead to a career in law or medicine; meanwhile he worked as an apprentice in a painting firm to earn tuition. Miller then enrolled in the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his studies.

Eloquent, bordering on the lyrical, the letters provide riveting first-hand accounts of cavalry raids, the monotony of camp life, and the horror of battlefield carnage. Miller gives detailed descriptions of military uniforms, cavalry tactics, and prison conditions. He conveys a deep commitment to the Confederacy, but he was also critical of Confederate policies that he felt hindered the army's efforts. Dispersed among these war-related topics is the story of Miller's budding relationship with Celestine “Cellie” McCann, the love of his life, whom he would eventually marry.

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front cover of UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION
UNDER THE FLAG OF THE NATION
DIARIES AND LETTERS OF OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS, A YANKEE VOLUNTEER IN THE CIVIL WAR
OWEN JOHNSTON HOPKINS
The Ohio State University Press, 1998
From these diaries and letters of a soldier in the Union Army emerges a revealing portrait of their author, a man caught up in a life-and-death struggle of national import. Compiled from the diaries kept by Owen Johnston Hopkins while he was on duty with the 42nd and 182nd regiments, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and from letters to his family and friends, this book gives a clear picture of the motives, attitudes, and sentiments of a Yankee soldier during the Civil War.

Owen Hopkins was a young man brought to maturity by the agony of war, but in spite of the horror of battle and the tedium of life in camp, he maintained a lively sense of humor and a constant devotion to the ideals for which he fought. The Civil War in these pages is a savage, vindictive conflict fought with canister, "minnie balls," grapeshot, the Enfield rifle, and the bayonet. Only seventeen when he enlisted in 1861, Hopkins was a foot soldier and a witness to the action that took place on the field of battle.

A vital part of Hopkins's life in the army was his correspondence with Julia Allison, who lived in his hometown of Bellefontaine. They began writing each other in 1863, and their friendship deepened into love. Each was a fervent patriot, and their shared devotion to their country was a significant fact of their relationship. They were married in 1865.

An epilogue tells what happened to Hopkins after June of 1865: his career, his family, and his death in 1902. Originally published in1961, this work is now available for the first time in paperback.
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front cover of Understanding Attitudes About War
Understanding Attitudes About War
Gregory G. Brunk
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996

Choice 1997 Outstanding Academic Book


Why have some traditional cold warriors opposed involvement in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, while many vocal critics of the Vietnam war supported the use of U.S. forces in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans? What do these debates tell us about American attitudes toward the use of military force to achieve foreign policy goals? The authors examine the ethical and moral underpinnings of U.S. international relations by exploring the attitudes of decision makers and foreign policy elites toward war. Their unique contribution is to bring together the various doctrines in the literature and to characterize them using behavioral methodologies, in an attempt to bring normative questions back into the mainstream of political science.

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Undertones of War
Edmund Blunden
University of Chicago Press, 2007
“I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!”

In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”

All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.

Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.
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front cover of Union Must Stand
Union Must Stand
Civil War Diaries John Quincy Adams Campbell
Mark Grimsley
University of Tennessee Press, 2000
Only rarely does a Civil War diarist combine detailed observations of events with an intelligent understanding of their significance. John Campbell, a newspaperman before the war, left such a legacy. A politically aware Union soldier with strong moral and abolitionist beliefs, Campbell recorded not only his own reflections on wartime matters but also those of his comrades and the southerners—soldiers, civilians, and slaves—that he encountered.

Campbell served in the Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry from 1861 to 1864. He participated in the war's major theaters and saw early action at Island No. 10, Iuka, and Corinth. His diary is especially valuable because he viewed the war as both a field-commissioned officer able to make intelligent comments about combat and as a former enlisted man with a feel for the soldier's life. He was present during Grant's campaign at Vicksburg and depicted the bloody failure of the May 22 storming of Confederate fortifications in unsparing terms; he then went on to fight at Chattanooga and took Gen. William T. Sherman to task for his poor leadership at Missionary Ridge.

The Union Must Stand contains more than Campbell's journal. Editors Mark Grimsley and Todd Miller have written an introduction that provides background information and places the diary in the context of current debate over the ideological commitments of Civil War soldiers. An appendix reproduces fifteen of Campbell's letters to his hometown newspaper, in which he shared his impressions of both war and slavery.
With its unique point of view, valuable insights into the conduct of various campaigns, and some of the most vivid depictions of Civil War combat ever set to paper, Campbell's diary offers both a wealth of new primary material for historians and exciting reading for enthusiasts. Combining a journalist's accuracy with a zealot's idealism, it makes a forceful statement about why one man went to war.

The Editors: Mark Grimsley is an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University and the author of The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865.

Todd D. Miller is a history teacher and an independent researcher for Time-Life Books' Civil War series. He lives in Ashland, Ohio.


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front cover of The Untried Life
The Untried Life
The Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War
James T. Fritsch
Ohio University Press, 2012

Told in unflinching detail, this is the story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, also known as the Giddings Regiment or the Abolition Regiment, after its founder, radical abolitionist Congressman J. R. Giddings. The men who enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth OVI were, according to its lore, handpicked to ensure each was as pure in his antislavery beliefs as its founder. Whether these soldiers would fight harder than other soldiers, and whether the people of their hometowns would remain devoted to the ideals of the regiment, were questions that could only be tested by the experiment of war.

The Untried Life is the story of these men from their very first regimental formation in a county fairground to the devastation of Gettysburg and the march to Atlanta and back again, enduring disease and Confederate prisons. It brings to vivid life the comradeship and loneliness that pervaded their days on the march. Dozens of unforgettable characters emerge, animated by their own letters and diaries: Corporal Nathan Parmenter, whose modest upbringing belies the eloquence of his writings; Colonel Lewis Buckley, one of the Twenty-Ninth’s most charismatic officers; and Chaplain Lyman Ames, whose care of the sick and wounded challenged his spiritual beliefs.

The Untried Life shows how the common soldier lived—his entertainments, methods of cooking, medical treatment, and struggle to maintain family connections—and separates the facts from the mythology created in the decades after the war.

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