New Books In Military History

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made. As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of