TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Best of TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

  • Rifles and Ranges

    Drew Wagenhoffer has a short review up of Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth. Although he calls it “the best single volume treatment of the subject so far,” he does raise some significant questions, including one I hadn’t thought of (showing, again, the value of distributed intelligence). There is […]

  • Review: Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

    Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James McPherson Product Details Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (October 7, 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1594201919 ISBN-13: 978-1594201912 Lincoln is always right, the generals always wrong. “James M. McPherson is, without any second thoughts, the premier author of the civil war, the […]

  • Are Slavery and Emancipation the ONLY Things Worth Studying from the American Civil War?

    There have been quite a few mentions of the Gettysburg Visitor Center over the past few weeks in the Civil War blogosphere, and some of this has spilled over into the question of what type of interpretation should be seen at our Civil War battlefield visitor centers. John Hennessy, National Park Service Chief Historian at […]

  • The Lieber Code

    American Scholar takes a look at the Lieber Code, formalized in 1863 by the US Army as General Orders No. 100. This was one of the first formal codes concerning the conduct of war, and is the basis of the modern ones such as the Hague and Geneva conventions. The author, Francis Lieber (1798–1872), was […]

  • Black Confederates

    Update: Welcome to TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog for those of you who have found this page through a Google Search!  If you enjoy what you’re about to read below, feel free to Subscribe to TOCWOC’s RSS feed.  Be sure to check out the Civil War Book Reviews which have been posted here and […]

  • Phil Myers on British-American Relations

    Staying with the theme of recent book reviews for another day, let’s take a look at the comments section from my recent review of Phil Myers’ new book Caution and Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations.  Fellow TOCWOC blogger Fred Ray and long-time TOCWOC reader Stephen Graham had a discussion about the merits […]

  • B&G Article on Fort Stedman: Who Probed Fort Friend?

    In my last post I looked the attacks on the attacks on Battery IX and Fort McGilvery in the northern sector, where I concluded that Gen. Walker got three brigades into action (Lewis, Kasey and Ransom) but failed to make a coordinated attack on Battery IX and any ground attack at all on Fort McGilvery. […]