Book Review

At the 1999 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Toronto, a round table of Civil War historians asked, "What do military and cultural histories of the Civil War have to say to each other?" The conversation was certainly quite timely, reflecting recent developments in the literature, but one could easily have imagined the great scholars of past generations feeling quite at home in the room. The essential challenge of Civil War studies is to integrate the purely military history with the great diversity of work addressing nonmilitary topics. The panel concluded that the best Civil War scholarship must come to terms both with a military-political narrative and with broader cultural and social insights. The discussion eventually evolved into a conversation about how academic historians can best speak to a larger audience, a topic of considerable interest to Civil War historians. Thus, our analysis of the field of Civil War studies is arrayed along several axes, reflecting a vast diversity of scholarly topics and approaches as well as a broad spectrum of writing, some ofwhich is aimed at a sophisticated—but nonprofessional—reading audience.	1
The four books under review indicate both the breadth and the depth of this scholarship. Writing the Civil War, edited by James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr., is a superb collection of twelve historiographic essays that map out the landscape of Civil War scholarship. The monographs by Don E. Alberts, William Blair, and William C. Davis provide three distinct points on that larger landscape and thus illustrate some of the themes raised in the collection.	2
McPherson and Cooper have assembled anextraordinary collection of authors. The twelve essays fall into thirds: the first four addressing military topics; the second, political and constitutional issues; and the final four focusing on social and economic life. Gary Gallagher—best known for his work on the Confederacy—starts things off with an analysis of "Northern strategy and military policy." Gallagher considers broad debates about emancipation and total war before embarking on a historiographic summary of Northern military strategy. Emory Thomas's companion essay on the Confederacy pays less attention than Gallagher's to individual leaders, focusing instead on the competing explanations for Confederate defeat. Joseph T. Glatthaar's essay on "Battlefield Tactics" is a valuable primer on the mysteries of military technology and their effect on Civil War tactics. Glatthaar also shows a refreshing candor in dismissing the many "potboiler publications [that are] hoping to tap the exploding Civil War book market" while singling out several military studies for praise. In his welcome survey of the booming subfield on "the study of Civil War soldiers," Reid Mitchell guides the reader from Bell Irvin Wiley through James McPherson. Mitchell is particularly free with his evaluations, noting that one prominent volume "studiously avoided tough questions—and new ones" while concluding that "Earl Hess's Liberty, Virtue and Progress [1988] is a brilliant book that failed to attract the notice it deserved."	. . .