In To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond, Benjamin Franklin Cooling continues his monumental study of the Civil War in Tennessee and Kentucky. A sequel to his earlier books Forts Henry and Donelson and Fort Donelson’s Legacy, this volume explores the profound turmoil—on the battlefield, on the homefront, in the political arena—that reigned in the region as the war ground to a close.

In Andrew Johnson’s Civil War and Reconstruction, Paul Bergeron, the preeminent authority on the seventeenth president, offers a nuanced and balanced reflection on this much-vilified figure and his approach to reestablishing the union in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination.

Edited by Lawrence L. Hewitt and Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., Volume 3 of Confederate Generals in the Western Theater presents ten new essays filled with fresh insights into the key question of why the Confederate high command in the West could not match the performance of Robert E. Lee in the East.

Speaking of the war in the East, Matt Spruill focuses on the nineteen critical decisions that affected the outcome of that theater’s most famous battle in Decisions at Gettysburg. This important new reference includes an appendix that tours the battlefield, complete with excerpts from primary documents.

Another decisive battle is examined in John S. Kountz’s Record of the Organizations Engaged in the Campaign, Siege, and Defense of Vicksburg, edited by Timothy B. Smith. A former Union solider who fought at Vicksburg, Kountz served as official historian at Vicksburg National Military Park at the turn of the century, and this publication makes his hard-to-find accounts of the campaign readily available to the modern reader.

UT Press’s acclaimed Voices of the Civil War series includes two new volumes. In Last to Leave the Field, Timothy J. Orr compiles the letters of Union solider Ambrose Henry Hayward of the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. Hayward’s missives to his family detail the critical battles in which he participated while revealing his strong belief in the Union cause. An opposing view can be found in John Dooley’s Civil War, edited by Robert Emmett Curran. This edition of a young Confederate officer’s wartime journals includes an essay he wrote in defense of secession as well as a long poem on what he perceived as the evils of Reconstruction.

In The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow, Nathanial Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Roy P. Stonesifer Jr. examine both the general’s famous failures and often-overlooked achievements. And in Refugitta of Richmond, edited by Hughes and S. Kittrell Rushing, the wife of President Jefferson Davis’s private secretary, Constance Cary Harrison, offers an insider’s view of the Confederate elite.

More info at www.utpress.org/civilwar.