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Suppliers to the Confederacy: More British Imported Arms & Accoutrements Volume II By Craig L. Barry & David C. Burt
“Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A. 1861- 1865.By M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey. Illustrated, photos, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 516 pp., 2015, Mercer, www.mupress.org, $35.
The Confederate 11th Tennessee served from November 1861 through May 1865 and saw action at Cumberland Gap, Rockcastle (Ky.), Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw, Franklin, Nashville and Atlanta.
Their wartime experiences typify the hardships and disadvantages of serving in the Western Confederate army. The 11th, for instance, carried flintlock muskets through the first year or so of their enlistment. These weapons proved very ineffective against better-armed Federal troops.
This regimental history, however, is so much more than a dull recitation of
Gettysburg: The Quest for Meaning: Essays on How We Remember the Battle and Understand Its Consequences. Edited by Gerald Christianson, Barbara Franco and Leonard Hummel. Illustrations, bibliography, index, 224 pp., 2015, Seminary Ridge Press, www.ltsg.edu/srp, $18.95.
Perched atop Gettysburg’s Seminary Ridge, “Old Dorm” is perhaps best known for its sturdy cupola, which afforded cavalryman John Buford a view of the battle as it unfolded to the west on July 1, 1863.
Once inaccessible to visitors and later the headquarters of the local historical society, the elegant building is now host to one of the finest Civil War museums in the
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Find your ancestors - Over 15,000 genealogy books & CDs tactics and battles. I have never read such a thoroughly documented Army of Tennessee regimental history.
It is loaded with newspaper articles, wartime letters and anecdotes, which flesh out the lives of the officers and men and their personal experiences.
Anecdotes include “loyal” Tennessee ladies showing the rebels the “backs of their hands” or “French salute” as they passed through east Tennessee. In another incident, a lieutenant yelled at a soldier who was fleeing with two stolen chickens, “What the hell are you doing?” — at which the private turned around to see the officer with his own captured birds.
Then there is a letter home from a private to his family informing them of the deaths of several friends but not knowing that he would never pen another letter to them.
About half of this excellent work is more than 100 wartime and civilian photographs of regiment members
Dedicated in 2013, the Seminary Ridge Museum invites its visitors to wrestle with big ideas. Exhibits narrate the events of July 1 but insist that its horrors persisted long after the roar of battle subsided.
Recalling the building’s use as a field hospital, galleries lined with crutches and prostheses meditate on the human costs of the war. Finally, reminding that the war’s horrors visited a place of peace, the museum challenges visitors to think about religion and reconciliation.
The museum has inspired some powerful conversations in its short existence — and now this book of essays edited by founding director Barbara Franco and two faculty members (one emeritus) from the Lutheran Theological Seminary. The
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followed by a thoroughly descriptive annotated roster of the regiment. The appendices consist of the names of those who suffered casualties, men in Federal prisons, and officer rosters.
The maps, while very well done, are in the front of the book, making it difficult to use them while reading the battle accounts. That is my only criticism of the work.
“Forward My Brave Boys!” is an excellent regimental. I would put it right alongside Steven Stubbs’s history of the 11th Mississippi and Craig L. Dunn’s Harvestfields of Death (20th Indiana) as a book that readers interested in the daily lives of common soldiers should have in their libraries.
John Michael Priest retired from teaching in 2011 after serving 30.5 years. He is a guide at Antietam. He has published four Civil War books and is an avid 54mm wargamer — French and Indian War through the U. S. Civil War.
editors also present a foreword from Ed Linenthal, a significant voice in the study of historical memory.
A few of the essays are either novel in approach or reach compelling conclusions. Franco contributes a thought-provoking essay about the converging aims of public history and public theology. Pamela Cooper- White offers an analysis of ghosthunting at Gettysburg, connecting the industry to historical memory and a paradoxical search for authenticity.
Susan Colestock Hill reintroduces Elsie Singmaster, whose fiction and non-fiction about the battle have not yet commanded enough scholarly attention. Leonard Hummel’s piece alters our gaze by considering how students at the Lutheran Seminary engage the battle.
Other contributions, such as those on Lincoln’s religious beliefs, the Lost Cause myth, and Gettysburg as a place of secular pilgrimage, are less inventive. These pieces largely echo the findings of other scholars. Furthermore, though each contribution illuminates an aspect of Seminary Ridge’s rich history, several essays do not live up to the subtitle.
Overall, the book manages to come at Civil War memory from some oblique angles. Read it, but visit the fabulous museum that inspired it first.
Brian Matthew Jordan, assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University, is author of Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War. He is at work on a biography of Ben Butler.