The South is full of stories of lost fortunes waiting to be discovered—think of the buried Confederate money in Faulkner’s The Hamlet. But that was fiction. The following story of a recovered Southern treasure is true.

In the summer of 2004, a collector in Roanoke, Virginia, purchased a box stuffed full of an odd collection of documents. The container held ticket stubs, a college transcript, hand-drawn maps, newspaper clippings, and both typewritten and handwritten letters and stories. Examined closely, the materials revealed themselves to be the papers of George S. Bernard, Petersburg lawyer and member of the 12^th Virginia infantry regiment during the Civil War. Packed into the box were several reminiscences of the war prepared by Bernard and other veterans. Several months after the discovery, the History Museum and Historical Society of Western Virginia purchased the collection.

Over the course of his life, Bernard wrote extensively about his wartime experiences and collected accounts from other veterans. In 1892, he published his acclaimed work, War Talks of Confederate Veterans, a rich collection of firsthand accounts focusing on the battles and campaigns of the 12^th Virginia. The book is still in print today. Bernard prepared a second volume of war talks but was never able to publish it. While some of Bernard’s work for the project was included in the collections of his papers residing at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University, much of it was considered lost. The Roanoke discovery, however, proved to be the crucial final piece in the puzzle that allowed a second volume of Bernard’s Civil War history finally to be assembled. With the publication in May 2012 of Civil War Talks: Further Reminiscences of George S. Bernard and His Fellow Veterans, edited by Hampton Newsome, John Horn, and John G. Selby, the reunion of nearly all the pieces of Bernard’s lost book will be complete.

Civil War Talks is the latest title in the series A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era, published by the University of Virginia Press. Another new title in the Nation Divided series is Libra R. Hilde’s fascinating and, some would say, long overdue study of Civil War nurses, Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South, which, through public and private documents, demonstrates just how much the South relied on female labor to continue fighting.

Also out this spring is Michael L. Nicholls’ Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy. The definitive account of the 1800 slave revolt that sought literally to end slavery in Virginia, Nicholls’ book takes advantage of the most current scholarship, as well as a detailed study of the actual environment in which the plot came to be, to create a document that is not only remarkably vivid but which corrects the considerable misconceptions about the planned rebellion.

More information on these three titles, plus many other titles on the Civil War and Southern history (including a revised edition of the classic guide book Civil War Sites in Virginia), may be found at the University of Virginia Press web site: http://upress.virginia.edu.