Minnie Pearl became my friend in 1964. I was 18, new in town, and Minnie Pearl took me under her wing. She gave me good advice, the how to’s, the how not to’s, the when to’s, and the when not to’s. I learned a lot from her as a woman and as a professional entertainer but above all that, as a good, solid human being. Minnie was more than a big laugh. She was a big heart, and I will always love her.”
—Dolly Parton
Howdy!
The Minnie Pearl Story
MARY ELLEN PETHEL AND DON CUSIC
“Take the backroads, not the highways,” Minnie Pearl often said—a sentiment that captures her life’s winding, unpredictable journey. Born Sarah Ophelia Colley in 1912, she grew up in Centerville, Tennessee. This small-town upbringing inspired her imagined hometown of Grinder’s Switch.
During the Great Depression, Sarah moved to Nashville to study theater at the Ward-Belmont School. After graduating, she joined a touring theater company and performed throughout the Southeast. It was on the road, in 1936, that she met and stayed with Mattie Burden. Mattie became the inspiration for Minnie Pearl’s iconic persona—a witty country girl known for her signature greeting and straw hat with a dangling price tag.
Minnie Pearl’s big break came in 1940 when a friend of a WSM radio executive saw her perform and recommended her for the Grand Ole Opry. Her debut marked the beginning of a career that spanned more than fifty years. Garth Brooks later remarked, “When she walked out, everybody waited for the ‘How-dee!’ It’s just two syllables, one word, but every time she said it—it felt like it was just for you.”
At the Opry, the “Queen of Country Comedy” shared the spotlight with legends like Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. After World War II, she became a mentor and matriarch, befriending a young June Carter and warming up the crowd for Johnny Cash’s Opry debut in 1955.
Throughout her career, Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon skillfully balanced her dual roles as Minnie and Sarah. Whether at the Opry, on the road, or on Hee Haw, Minnie remained a trusted friend to female performers like Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, and Reba McEntire. As k.d. lang noted, “Minnie understood where country music needed to go and who it needed to embrace. She was a visionary.”
Rich with 155 historic photographs, this definitive biography covers the many chapters of Sarah Cannon’s life. Drawing from archives and interviews with those who knew her, Howdy! The Minnie Pearl Story, captures not only Cannon’s enduring humor and impact, but also the woman behind the laughter.
MARY ELLEN PETHEL is a professor of practice at Belmont University. She is the author of Title IX, Pat Summitt, and Tennessee’s Trailblazers: Fifty Years, Fifty Stories and Athens of the New South: College Life and the Making of Modern Nashville.
DON CUSIC is a professor of music business and the Music City Professor of Music Industry History at Belmont University. He is the author of nearly thirty books on country music and musicians, most recently America and the American Record Business: A History. He is also the editor of the International Journal of Country Music.
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-058-5
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-059-2
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-0608
7 x 10 | 196 pages
$29.95t Hardcover
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 2025
Biography; Country Music; Comedy
ALSO OF INTEREST
Tex Morton
From Australian Yodeler to International Showman
ANDREW K. SMITH
Paperback ISBN 978-1-62190-776-3
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-777-0
$29.95t
The Charles K. Wolfe Music Series
Ted Olson, Series Editor
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-036-3
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-037-0
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-038-7
6 x 9 | 216 pages
$24.95t
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2025
True Crime; Memoir; Southern History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Whispering in the Daylight
The Children of Tony Alamo
Christian Ministries and Their Journey to Freedom
DEBBY SCHRIVER
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-62190-386-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 978-1-62190-387-1
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-388-8
$29.95t
Boss Brooks
A True Story of Fraud, Family, and Forgiveness from Tennessee to Texas
KATHY BINGHAM TURNER AND LEON ALLIGOOD
In 1931, Boss Bingham, the head cashier of Hardin County Bank in Saltillo, Tennessee, faked his death from a fiery auto accident and fled west to escape allegations of fraud and embezzlement. While his three children believed he was dead, Bingham reinvented himself as Marvin Lester Brooks, a rancher in Sherwood, Texas, where he married and raised a second family. Upon his death four decades later, he became a man with two tombstones.
In Boss Brooks: A True Story of Fraud, Family, and Forgiveness from Tennessee to Texas, Bingham’s granddaughter Kathy Bingham Turner and journalist Leon Alligood uncover the truth about Boss’s deception and explore the impacts on both his families. Through meticulous research and personal reflections, the authors delve into the history of rural Tennessee and Texas, revealing the complex legacy of a man whose final confession came only after suffering a stroke in 1972.
A gripping memoir of family secrets revealed, Boss Brooks offers a compelling blend of historical context and personal discovery. Turner and Alligood have produced a captivating saga that helps us understand the multifaceted nature of family legacies.
KATHY BINGHAM TURNER is a former corporate director of human resources for newspapers in ten states. Uncovering the complicated truth about her grandfather became a passion after retirement. She resides in Franklin, Tennessee, and is pleased to share the Boss Brooks story with readers everywhere.
LEON ALLIGOOD, an emeritus professor of journalism at Middle Tennessee State University, was previously a reporter covering rural Middle Tennessee in a career spanning two decades and garnering numerous awards. He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College and was chosen for the Tennessee Journalism Hall of Fame. He lives near Lebanon, Tennessee.
“
A monumental piece of work . . . an amazing accomplishment and a pleasure to read.”
—David Michaelis, author of Eleanor, the bestselling biography of Eleanor Roosevelt
Citizen of the Shadows
The Lives and Lies of Lothar Witzke
PAUL FRIEDLAND AND ROBERT HORNICK
One of the most notorious German spies of the twentieth century, Lothar Witzke lived a life that reads like a thriller. Convicted of espionage in 1918, he was the only German spy sentenced to death by the United States during World War I. After the war, he was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge, only to be later accused of responsibility for one of the most spectacular acts of sabotage in US history: the Black Tom munitions depot explosion.
After being repatriated to Germany, Witzke lived in Latin America and China as a German expat and later joined the Nazi party. He ran espionage squads in Great Britain during World War II and became a prominent businessman in Hamburg after the war. He was killed in Hamburg in 1962, possibly by an East German agent as payback for suspected double agent work on behalf of the British.
With Citizen of the Shadows, the first full biography of Witzke, Paul Friedland and Robert Hornick trace Witzke’s morally complicated life and show readers how an infamous spy thrived in the interwar years and after. They probe his trial, conviction, and pardon, and analyze whether Witzke was really involved in the Black Tom explosion. In doing so, the authors uncover that many of the details of Witzke’s life—long assumed to be true—were lies.
PAUL FRIEDLAND is an international lawyer. He was global head of the international arbitration practice at White & Case, LLP from 2002 to 2019. He is the author of Arbitration Clauses for International Contracts (2007).
ROBERT HORNICK is an independent scholar and international lawyer. Now retired, he practiced at Coudert Brothers and Morgan Lewis and taught part-time at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Girls and Boys of Belchertown: A Social History of the Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded (2012) and What Remains: Searching for the Memory and Lost Grave of John Paul Jones (2017).
Legacies of War Series
G. Kurt Piehler, Series Editor
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-033-2
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-032-5
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-034-9
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-035-6
6 x 9 | 504 pages
Paperback $29.95t; Hardcover $64.95s
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 2025
Biography; Military History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Tennessee’s Experience during the First World War
MICHAEL E. BIRDWELL, EDITOR Hardcover ISBN 978-1-62190-531-8
$62s
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-052-3
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-053-0
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-054-7
6 x 9 | 330 pages
$29.95t
AVAILABLE FEBRUARY 2026
Memoir; Literary Criticism; Appalachian Studies
ALSO OF INTEREST
Momma’s Lost Piano
A Memoir
DAVID MADDEN
Paperback ISBN 978-1-62190-782-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 978-1-62190-784-8
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-783-1
$29.95t
The Dead, Alive, and Busy
Selected Essays of Robert Morgan
EDITED BY RANDALL WILHELM
For six decades, Robert Morgan has been a preeminent voice in southern Appalachian literature. Growing up in Green River, North Carolina, in the 1950s, he absorbed a variety of influences to inform his later work: his family’s haunting stories, explorations of the mountainous landscape, paperbacks from a bookmobile, lessons from a kind elementary school teacher. Decades later, his acclaimed writing resulted in a fifty-one-year career at Cornell University, a plethora of literary awards, and a place on the New York Times bestseller list. The essays collected in this volume reveal the ways Morgan writes about literature with the same reverence he uses to describe his homeplace.
The Dead, Alive, and Busy is a collection of essays on the author’s personal history, masters of prose, and significant poets. Morgan’s catalogue of literary interests is a melting pot of global traditions, from Leo Tolstoy to Appalachian writers such as Thomas Wolfe and Wilma Dykeman. His analysis covers writers “in a community across time”—including Poe, Hemingway, McCarthy, Carl Sandburg, and the Appalachian poets Jeff Daniel Marion and Jim Wayne Miller. Akin to his own description of Bierstadt’s paintings, Morgan’s writing throughout reflects “intimacy more than spectacle.”
ROBERT MORGAN is a poet, novelist, and essayist from North Carolina. He has been a professor of English at Cornell since 1971 and has published seventeen collections of poetry, six volumes of short fiction, seven novels, two collections of essays, and biographies of Daniel Boone and Edgar Allan Poe
RANDALL WILHELM is a writer, editor, and researcher who lives in Clemson, South Carolina. He is editor of Conversations with Robert Morgan, Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash, and The Ron Rash Reader.
Guide to the Vascular Plants of Tennessee
Second Edition
JOEY SHAW, EDWARD W. CHESTER, AND B. EUGENE WOFFORD
First published in 2015, Guide to the Vascular Plants of Tennessee is the most comprehensive, detailed, and up-to-date resource of its kind for the flora of the Volunteer State, home to nearly 2,900 documented taxa. Not since Augustin Gattinger’s 1901 Flora of Tennessee and a Philosophy of Botany has a work of this scope been attempted. In this second edition, author Joey Shaw and his team meticulously update the flora of the state to help students, researchers, and armchair botanists identify the myriad plants of the Volunteer State.
The team of editors, authors, and contributors not only provide keys for identifying the major groups, families, genera, species, and lesser taxa known to be native or naturalized within the state—with supporting information about distribution, frequency of occurrence, conservation status, and more—but they also offer a plethora of descriptive information about the state’s physical environment and vegetation, along with a summary of its rich botanical history, dating back to the earliest Native American inhabitants.
Other features of the book include a comprehensive glossary of botanical terms and an array of line drawings that illustrate the identifying characteristics of vascular plants, from leaf shape and surface features to floral morphology and fruit types. Finally, the book’s extensive keys are indexed by families, scientific names, and common names. The result is a userfriendly work that researchers, students, environmentalists, foresters, conservationists, and indeed anyone interested in Tennessee and its botanical legacy and resources will value for years to come.
JOEY SHAW is UC Foundation Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. and coauthor (with Professor Chester) of Guide to the Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Tennessee.
EDWARD W. CHESTER is professor emeritus of biology at Austin Peay State University, where he taught botany and curated the herbarium for more than forty-five years.
B. EUGENE WOFFORD is director emeritus of the University of Tennessee Herbarium and coauthor (with Professor Chester) of Guide to the Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Tennessee.
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-020-2
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-021-9
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-022-6
7 x 10 | 868 pages
$54.95t
AVAILABLE MARCH 2026
Botany; Nature Guides
ALSO OF INTEREST
Gardening with the Native Plants of Tennessee
MARGIE HUNTER
Paperback ISBN 9781572331556
$34.95t
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-023-3
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-024-0
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-025-7
5 x 8 | 232 pages
$24.95t
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 2025
Civil War History; Tennessee History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Forging a New South
The Life of General
John T. Wilder
MAURY NICELY
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-62190-800-5
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-801-2
$55s
The Greatest Calamity
Tennessee in the Civil War Era
JOHN D. FOWLER
“This is the greatest calamity that could befall us,” wrote Sallie Gannaway Jamison in 1861, echoing the fears of a generation of Tennesseans. Over the next four years, the Civil War would upend the lives of more than a million residents of the Volunteer State—soldiers and civilians, free and enslaved.
The last state to secede and the first to fall to Federal forces, Tennessee played a pivotal role in the war’s political, military, and industrial struggles. Crisscrossed by key rail lines and blanketed by rich farmland, the struggle to control it fueled both Union and Confederate war efforts. More than 450 battles—at Shiloh, Stones River, Chattanooga, and beyond—turned the state’s landscape into hallowed ground.
John D. Fowler argues in his introduction that “one cannot understand the Civil War without understanding the Volunteer State’s role in it.” The Greatest Calamity: Tennessee in the Civil War Era, the first title in the University of Tennessee Press’s revived Three Star Series, offers a fresh, accessible take on this history. Expanding on Thomas Connelly’s Civil War Tennessee: Battles and Leaders (1979), Fowler integrates new perspectives on the home front, Reconstruction, and the struggles of freed people, making this volume essential reading for students, scholars, and history enthusiasts alike.
JOHN D. FOWLER is a professor of history at Dalton State University in Georgia. He is the author of Mountaineers in Gray: The Story of the Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, CSA and editor of The Confederate Experience Reader.
Three Star Series
Introductory Histories on the State of Tennessee
Decisions on Western Waters
The Twenty-Seven Critical Decisions that Defined the Operations
MICHAEL D. BECKER
At the outset of the Civil War, General Winfield Scott drafted the Anaconda Plan, an ambitious strategy to blockade Southern ports and use army forces supported by naval gunboats to secure control of the Mississippi River for the Union, effectively dividing the Confederacy in two. Over the course of the campaign, General Grant’s ground forces closely cooperated with river forces under the leadership of Flag Officers Andrew H. Foote and David Dixon Porter, as well as Rear Admiral David Farragut, to successfully seize Confederate strongholds along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Their gunboats and ironclads became known as the Brown Water Navy. This long, successful Federal campaign succeeded in opening the Mississippi River with the capture of New Orleans and the Confederate capitulation of Vicksburg.
Decisions on Western Waters explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal politicians and commanders during the campaign that shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a linear history of the campaign, Michael D. Becker homes in on decisions made by both sides of the contest to provide a clear blueprint of the campaign development and conduct at its tactical core. Exploring the decisions in this manner allows students of the campaign to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened.
Complete with maps and a driving tour, Decisions on Western Waters is an indispensable primer to the campaign on the western waterways, and readers looking for a concise introduction to the battles can tour this sacred ground—or read about it at their leisure—with key insights into the campaign and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself.
Decisions on Western Waters is the twenty-third in a series of books that explores the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War.
MICHAEL D. BECKER is a retired United States Marine Corps Colonel and is the author of several studies and articles for the Marines and their associated professional journal, the Marine Corps Gazette. He also served as the senior director of enrollment for the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania
Command Decisions in America’s Civil War Series
Matt Spruill and Larry Peterson, Series Editors
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-045-5
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-046-2
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-047-9
6 x 9 | 260 pages
$24.95t
AVAILABLE JANUARY 2026
Civil War History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns
The Twenty-One Critical Decisions that Defined the Operations
EDWARD COTHAM
Paperback ISBN 978-1-62190-913-2
ePub/Kindle ISBN 978-1-62190-914-9
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-915-6
$24.95t
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-055-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-056-1
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-057-8
6 x 9 | 278 pages
$39.95t
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2025
Higher Education; Religious History; Tennessee History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Lee University
The Path from Church of God Bible Training School to Modern University
In 1918, the Church of God established a Bible training school in Cleveland, Tennessee. Meant to be the Christian training arm of the denomination, the school grew to include a high school, music school, and junior college at its campus in Sevierville, Tennessee. Following World War II, it returned to Cleveland and took the name Lee College in honor of the second leader of the denomination and school, Reverend F. J. Lee.
In Lee University, John Coats not only chronicles the history of the college but also explores the university’s connection to and representation of the Church of God in the American South, offering a microcosm of an evolving evangelical denomination into the second half of the twentieth century. As a faculty member at Lee, Coats is uniquely positioned to offer an inside perspective of the institution’s history, examining the people and politics that have shaped it over time. Telling the story of the school through the contributions of influential leaders, key turning points, and ongoing tensions between traditionalists and progressives within the Church of God, Lee University is an ideal resource for those interested in Appalachian religious and Pentecostal history.
JOHN D. COATS is a professor of history and chair of the Department of History, Political Science, and Humanities at Lee University. His articles have appeared in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age, and Historically Speaking, among others.
JOHN COATS
Medical Mistrust in Appalachia
Helping Patients and Providers
Communicate with Cultural Humility
EDITED BY WENDY WELCH AND BETH O’CONNOR
According to the National Institutes of Health, about 25 percent of the American population does not trust doctors and medical professionals. Focusing on rural Appalachia specifically, Wendy Welch, PhD, MPH, and Beth O’Connor, Med, discuss the region’s complex relationships with modern medicine and its institutions in this important collection. Offering multiple academic and clinical perspectives in thirteen unique essays, Medical Mistrust in Appalachia explores the history of this skepticism toward healthcare, analyzing the region’s relationship to medical infrastructure and the relationship between medicine and marginalized communities.
This volume fills a gap in scholarship by elevating the voices of practitioners and wrestling with the realities of medical mistrust as a cultural phenomenon—one born from a system that has historically struggled to center the safety and health of Appalachian communities. Presenting medical mistrust as a justifiable reaction in the interest of self-preservation, Welch and O’Connor address Appalachian stereotypes while confronting the ways medical institutions have fostered environments of mistrust and inequality. Importantly, Welch and O’Connor conclude with a discussion of how medical infrastructure and Appalachia can move forward together. Medical Mistrust in Appalachia is a must-read for rural healthcare professionals, medical students, and readers interested in Appalachian culture.
WENDY WELCH is director of the Graduate Medical Education Consortium of Southwest Virginia and author of The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap and Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia. She is the editor of Public Health in Appalachia, From the Front Lines of the Appalachian Addiction Crisis, and Masks, Misinformation, and Making-Do: Appalachian Health-Care Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Welch is a radio reporter for Inside Appalachia.
BETH O’CONNOR has been the executive director of the Virginia Rural Health Association since 2005 and was the 2022 President of the National Rural Health Association. She contributed chapters to Masks, Misinformation, and Making-Do: Appalachian Health-Care Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic and Rural Education and Queer Identities: Rural and (Out)Rooted. O’Connor is the creator and host of the Rural Health Voice podcast
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-048-6
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-049-3
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-050-9
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-051-6
6 x 9 | 302 pages
$29.95t
AVAILABLE JANUARY 2026
Medicine; Appalachian Studies
ALSO OF INTEREST
Appalachian Cultural Competency
A Guide for Medical, Mental Health, and Social Service Professionals
SUSAN E. KEEFE
Paperback ISBN 978-1-62190-310-9
$34.50s
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-042-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-043-1
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-044-8
6 x 9 | 514 pages
$39.95s
AVAILABLE DECEMBER 2025
Religious History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Binkley A Congregational History
ANDREW GARDNER
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-62190-788-6
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-804-3
$40s
The Free Will Baptists A
New History
J. MATTHEW PINSON
In this scholarly treatment of a lesser-known denomination, J. Matthew Pinson offers a comprehensive history of the Free Will Baptist movement—a distinct theological tradition within the larger Baptist family.
Traversing four centuries of history in his analysis, Pinson divides his study into five parts, arranged in chronological and geographical order. He traces the beginnings of the Free Will Baptists in the Carolinas from the late 1600s, the denomination’s early expansion across the Southeast, the rise and decline of the Northern Freewill Baptists, and the identity and development of the Free Will Baptist movement into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The scarcity of archival evidence for the history of Free Will Baptists in the American South makes the chronicling of their history challenging. To illustrate the development of ideas within the tradition over time, Pinson creatively engages a unique combination of primary source materials, including general conference and local church minutes, confessional documents, and worship materials such as hymnals. A scholarly history as accessible as it is comprehensive, The Free Will Baptists: A New History is a valuable resource for students of religious history as well as Baptist historians.
J. MATTHEW PINSON is president and professor of historical theology at Welch College. He is author of Arminian and Baptist: Explorations in a Theological Tradition and editor of Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation by F. Leroy Forlines.
America’s Baptists
Keith Harper, Series Editor
Training for Atomic Warfare
US Army Doctrine and Education in the Early Cold War, 1945–1963
BRAD HARDY
In the early days of the Cold War, the United States Army underwent a fundamental shift in its strategic thinking. While World War II was won on a doctrinal paradigm of combined arms, the US Army of the 1950s believed that atomic weapons would change how international conflicts were won and lost. Training officers in atomic warfare was a challenge, since there was little real-world experience on which to draw. Initially resistant to atomic weapons, the Army evolved through school debates among traditionalists, tech-driven “Buck Rogers” visionaries, and integrators who unified old and new methods.
Facing classified data gaps, Army schools sparked cognitive shifts while the maneuverfires inversion redefined warfare. By the early 1960s, with the Vietnam War centered in the minds of US military leadership and the public, doctrine and professional military education for atomic warfighting faded as the stark realities of fighting in Vietnam settled in.
In Training for Atomic Warfare, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Hardy presents a unique view into the history of the US Army’s strategic shift toward—and then away from—atomic warfare. Moving chronologically, each of the book’s five chapters catalogs a segment of years between 1945 and 1960, showcasing how changes in US defense policy and technology reflected the Army’s doctrine and education. Training for Atomic Warfare draws compelling parallels between the army of the 1950s and the current decade, demonstrating how shifts in military methodologies reflect the character of changing global conflicts and international policy.
BRAD HARDY is a US Army lieutenant colonel and Army Strategist and holds a PhD in history from Florida State University. His articles have appeared in both scholarly and military journals, including the Journal of Military History, Foreign Policy, War Room, and Task and Purpose.
Legacies of War Series
G. Kurt Piehler, Series Editor
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-029-5
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-030-1
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-031-8
6 x 9 | 356 pages
$75s
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2025
Education; Military History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Critical Connections
The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge from the Dawn of the Atomic Age to the Present LEE RIEDINGER, ET. AL.
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-62190-654-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 978-1-62190-656-8
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-655-1
$39.95t
(The Artillery School, 1953), USAFAS
Hardcover ISBN 979-8-89527-026-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-027-1
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-028-8
6 x 9 | 392 pages
$48s
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2025
Civil War History
ALSO OF INTEREST
Virginia Secedes
A Documentary History
DWIGHT T. PITCAITHLEY, EDITOR
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-62190-843-2
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-850-0
$48s
Missouri and the Secession Crisis A
Documentary History
EDITED BY DWIGHT T. PITCAITHLEY
When Claiborne Fox Jackson took the oath of office as Missouri’s governor on January 3, 1861, only South Carolina had seceded from the Union. But in the weeks that followed, and as the Civil War loomed, more Southern states joined the Confederacy. Governor Jackson, who supported secession, called for a state convention to determine whether Missouri should follow suit. He found himself in a distinct minority, however, surrounded largely by Unionist delegates.
In Missouri and the Secession Crisis, Dwight T. Pitcaithley presents a collection of primary source documents that outline the history of the secession crisis in Missouri from the perspective of the state’s leading political figures. Arranged in chronological order, the volume includes addresses by outgoing and incoming governors, speeches by Missouri’s United States senators and representatives, and documents from the Missouri State Convention. Pitcaithley’s well-crafted introduction offers a comprehensive overview of the Show Me State’s political history, and his extensive annotations throughout the book provide context on key figures and events.
A detailed timeline of events, a helpful roster of State Convention delegates, and an appendix of questions for discussion make Pitcaithley’s Missouri and the Secession Crisis an ideal companion for scholars of Civil War history, the secession crisis, and the history of slavery in America.
DWIGHT T. PITCAITHLEY served as chief historian of the National Park Service for ten years and as a professor at New Mexico State University from 2005 until 2019. He is the editor of Tennessee Secedes: A Documentary History, Kentucky and the Secession Crisis: A Documentary History, and Virginia Secedes: A Documentary History.
The Lynch Family of South Carolina
From Reconstruction to Redemption
EDITED BY ROBERT EMMETT CURRAN
In this follow-up volume to For Church and Confederacy: The Lynches of South Carolina, Robert Emmett Curran extends his corpus of work on the history of Catholicism in the South through the eyes of the Lynch family of South Carolina. An Irish American family who sympathized with the Confederacy, the Lynches rose to prominence economically and in religious leadership during the late 1800s. Curran’s latest volume features a collection of personal correspondence from Lynch family members, telling the story of a family struggling to recover from the physical, financial, and emotional wreckage that the Civil War had left, while coping with the new order Reconstruction imposed upon the South.
With thirty-one chronological chapters spanning 1866 to 1882, this book of firsthand accounts fills a void in literature that treats the challenges and realities facing Irish Americans in the post–Civil War South. Each chapter begins with an orienting and engaging introduction, and a helpful family genealogy provides valuable context for readers. Offering a unique perspective on the Reconstruction, Redemption, and Gilded Age eras, The Lynch Family of South Carolina is an insightful and engaging resource for scholars of the post–Civil War era as well as those with an interest in Southern and religious history.
ROBERT EMMETT CURRAN is professor emeritus of history at Georgetown University where he taught for more than thirty years. He is the author or editor of eleven books related to the American Civil War and the history of Catholicism in the United States, including an earlier volume in the Voices of the Civil War Series, John Dooley’s Civil War. His most recent book is American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.
Voices of the Civil War Series
Michael P. Gray, Series Editor
Library of Congress
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-039-4
ePub/Kindle ISBN 979-8-89527-040-0
PDF ISBN 979-8-89527-041-7
6 x 9 | 372 pages
$39.95t
AVAILABLE DECEMBER 2025
Civil War History; Religious History
ALSO OF INTEREST
The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy Life Under Occupation in the Upper South
EDITED BY MINOA D. UFFELMAN, et al
Paperback ISBN 978-1-62190-726-8
ePub/Kindle ISBN 978-1-62190-727-5
PDF ISBN 978-1-62190-728-2
$29.95t
THE VOICES OF THE CIVIL WAR SERIES Revisit
MICHAEL P. GRAY, SERIES EDITOR
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-084-4
$24.95t
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2025
Memoirs of Lieut.-General Winfield Scott
EDITED BY TIMOTHY D. JOHNSON
The remarkable military career of General Winfield Scott spanned fifty-three years, fourteen presidents, and six wars, both foreign and domestic. However, his lengthy service did not secure his rightful place among the nation’s pantheon of great military leaders. Instead, he is most often remembered as the aged, overweight, and sickly commanding general who was replaced by George McClellan at the beginning of the Civil War. Originally published in 1864, only two years before his death, Scott’s memoirs touch on many of the significant events of the early and mid-nineteenth century. This new edition of those remembrances, expertly edited by Timothy D. Johnson, showcases Scott’s rare strategic insights, battlefield prowess, and diplomatic shrewdness, restoring him to his proper place as arguably the most important American general to ever serve his country.
Scott joined the army in 1808, earned the rank of brigadier general in 1814, and was promoted to commanding general in 1841. During the Mexican-American War, he commanded one of the most brilliant military campaigns in American history and mentored the generation of officers who fought the Civil War, including Generals Grant, Lee, Longstreet, Beauregard, Jackson, and Meade. As a young general, he wrote the first comprehensive set of regulations to govern the army and pushed for the professionalization of the U.S. officer corps. Yet, he was ridiculed at the beginning of the war for his prescient prediction that the Civil War would be a prolonged conflict requiring extensive planning and superior strategic thinking.
With this edition, Johnson has merged Scott’s large two-volume memoir into a single, manageable volume without losing any of the original 1864 text. Extensive new annotations update Scott’s outdated notes and provide valuable illumination and context. Covering a wide range of events—from the famous 1804 duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton through the end of the Civil War—Scott’s extraordinary account reveals the general as a sometimes egocentric but always astute witness to the early American republic.
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-083-7
$24.95t
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2025
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-084-4
$24.95t
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2025
No Pardons to Ask, Nor Apologies to Make
The Journal of William Henry King, Gray’s 28th Louisiana Infantry Regiment
EDITED BY GARY D. JOINER, MARILYN S. JOINER, AND CLIFTON D. CARDIN
William Henry King began war service in 1862 in Louisiana and ended it in 1865 in Camden, Arkansas. During this period he chronicled action in the Trans-Mississippi theater, producing a diary that yields one of the most important accounts from a Confederate enlisted man.
No Pardons to Ask, Nor Apologies to Make is a gritty look into the life of a soldier, with no romantic gloss. While most journals record mundane, day-to-day routines, King’s consistently detailed entries—notable for their literary style, King’s venomous wit, and his colorful descriptions—cover a wide array of matters pertaining to the Confederate experience in the West. King’s observations about his superiors, the Confederacy, contraband, and the under-reported Trans-Mississippi campaign are especially striking.
Sailing with Farragut
The Civil War Recollections of Bartholomew Diggins
EDITED BY GEORGE S. BURKHARDT
Sailing with Farragut shows readers the war through the recollections of Bartholomew Diggins, a young sailor who fought under U.S. Admiral David G. Farragut in the battles for control of the Mississippi River. A recent Irish immigrant, Diggins joined the crew of the USS Hartford, Admiral Farragut’s flagship, at age seventeen and served for three years.
Diggins’s memoir, one of a very few written by a sailor on either side, allows readers to experience a Northern seamen’s daily existence and the perilous battles he endured during the Civil War. From the bloody skirmishes around Vicksburg to Farragut’s disaster at Port Hudson and on to his victory at Mobile Bay, Sailing with Farragut gives readers a vivid view of life on the Mississippi during the Civil War and keen insight into the leader, officer, and man that was Admiral David Farragut.
THE VOICES OF THE CIVIL WAR SERIES Revisit
MICHAEL P. GRAY, SERIES
EDITOR
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-085-1
$24.95t
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2025
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89527-086-8
$24.95t
AVAILABLE AUGUST 2025
To Succeed or Perish
The Diaries of Sergeant Edmund Trent Eggleston, Company G, 1st Mississippi Light Artillery Regiment
EDITED BY LAWRENCE LEE HEWITT, THOMAS E. SCHOTT, AND MARC KUNIS
With the Conscription Act of 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first military draft in American history. Rather than face duty with strangers in an uncertain locale, twentyeight-year-old Edmund Trent Eggleston of Warren County, Mississippi, took advantage of a thirty-day grace period and joined his neighbors in volunteering for duty in Company G of the 1st Mississippi Light Artillery Regiment. Throughout his service, Eggleston kept a detailed account of his daily activities and those of his unit, a diary that remains one of the very few primary sources from a Confederate artillerist in the West. In To Succeed or Perish, editors Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Thomas E. Schott, and Marc Kunis present Eggleston’s diaries, along with his letters and ledgers, to offer a rare personal perspective on life behind the cannons in the Civil War’s Western Theater and a fascinating window into the world of the Confederate soldier.
A Yankee Horseman in the Shenandoah Valley
The Civil War Letters of John H. Black, Twelfth Pennsylvania Cavalry
EDITED BY DAVID J. COLES AND STEPHEN D. ENGLE
In many ways, John H. Black typified the thousands of volunteers who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Born in 1834 and raised on his family’s farm near Allegheny Township, Pennsylvania, Black taught school until he, like many Pennsylvanians, rushed to defend the Union after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861.
He served with the Twelfth Pennsylvania Cavalry, one of the Union’s most unruly, maligned, and criticized units. Consistently outperformed early in the conflict, the Twelfth finally managed to salvage much of its reputation by the end of the war. Throughout his service, Black penned frequent and descriptive letters to his fiancée and later wife, Jennie Leighty Black. This welcome volume presents this complete correspondence for the first time, offering a surprisingly full record of the cavalryman’s service from 1862 to 1865 and an intimate portrait of a wartime romance.
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