TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Cloyd Allen Smith, Jr.’s Sailor’s Creek Thesis from Texas A&M

I was looking through a couple of Google searches which had led people to TOCWOC today when I stumbled on a PDF version of Cloyd Allen Smith’s thesis on Sailor’s Creek. As a Civil War reader, I’ve always been a person who likes to browse through the notes at the end of a book and see what kind of unpublished work was consulted. This is how I found out about John Owen Allen’s thesis on regimental strengths during the Second Manassas Campaign, Leon Tenney’s thesis on the same subject during the Seven Days, and Edward O. Cunningham’s recently published dissertation on “Shiloh and the Western Campaigns of 1862”, now a published book from Savas Beatie.

I’ve started to “collect” any theses or dissertations I can find on Civil War subjects, but it appears to be a very hit or miss proposition when trying to find these online. Google Scholar has helped a bit in that regard, but if anyone knows of any other good sources, I’d love to hear about them. I do know about ProQuest, but I’d prefer to keep this post and the comments about those titles freely available online.

I’d like to add that I do not print these off but rather keep several copies on my various computers and that I will gladly purchase any books based on these if/when they come out. I haven’t had a chance to read this one. If anyone has, let me know what you think.

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Brett Schulte

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3 responses to “Cloyd Allen Smith, Jr.’s Sailor’s Creek Thesis from Texas A&M”

  1. Fred Ray Avatar
    Fred Ray

    Here’s on for you, Brett. If this link does not come thru email me.

    http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA384203

    Abstract : Helmuth von Moltke’s alleged statement the U.S. Civil War was an affair in which two armed mobs chased each other around the country and from which no lessons could be learned underlines a grave misjudgment of this war in contemporary Germany. Today, however, the American Civil War is recognized as the first modern war. It produced a number of lessons across the strategic operational and tactical levels that shaped the face of war. But the German observers failed to draw significant conclusions at the time. A wide variety of reasons inhibited a thorough and unbiased analysis. This study aims to analyze the German observations and to arrive at the causes that led to the underestimation and disregard of the lessons from the Civil War. The thesis provides a sketch of the Civil War and the situation of contemporary Germany. It then examines the German observers and their evaluations. Thereafter, the author reflects selected essential lessons of the war against the contemporary German military evolution. In a final step the conclusions of these sections will merge into an analysis of the causes, which prevented the German army from arriving at the lessons of the U.S. Civil War.

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  2. Ted Savas Avatar
    Ted Savas

    Hi Brett

    You have hit on an interesting point. Our very successful “The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown,” by Jerome Greene, was originally developed for the park service, and not for public eyes. When I got my hands on a copy, I saw the potential, and Greene graciously agreed to a re-write and expansion to make it trade-worthy.

    We are working on several other unpublished works, including an examination of the Sailor’s Creek manuscript (I don’t know if that is available, and we have not spoken to the author yet).

    Keep up the good work.

    (Also, great find, Fred. Very interesting.)

    Best regards.

    tps
    Theodore P. Savas
    Savas Beatie LLC
    989 Governor Drive, Suite 102
    El Dorado Hills, CA 95762
    916.941.6896 (Voice)
    916-941.6895 (Fax)
    http://www.savasbeatie.com

    Join us online for some publishing blogspeak at
    http://www.savasbeatie.blogspot.com and http://savasbeatiemarketing.blogspot.com/

    Reply
  3. Directory of History Dissertations: A Nice Search Tool

    […] war” and came up with 315 hits immediately. Some of you may have read my recent post on Cloyd Allen Smith, Jr.’s Sailor’s Creek thesis, and you know from that post of my interest in “collecting” unpublished theses and […]

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