The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography

With the assistance of several
scholars, including James M. McPherson and Gary Gallagher, and a long-time
specialist in Civil War books, Ralph Newman, David Eicher has selected
for inclusion in The Civil War in Books the 1,100 most important
books on the war. These are organized into categories as wide-ranging
as "Battles and Campaigns," "Biographies, Memoirs, and
Letters," "Unit Histories," and "General Works."
The last of these includes volumes on black Americans and the war, battlefields,
fiction, pictorial works, politics, prisons, railroads, and a host of
other topics.
Annotations are included for
all entries in the work, which is presented in an oversized 8 1/2 x 11
inch volume in two-column format. Appendixes list "prolific"
Civil War publishers and other Civil War bibliographies, and the works
included in Eicher's mammoth undertaking are indexed by author or editor
and by title.
Gary Gallagher's foreword
traces the development of Civil War bibliographies and declares that Eicher's
annotation exceeds that of any previous comprehensive volume. The Civil
War in Books, Gallagher believes, is "precisely the type of guide"
that has been needed.
The first full-scale, fully-annotated
bibliography on the Civil War to appear in more than thirty years, Eicher's
The Civil War in Books is a remarkable compendium of the best reading
available about the worst conflict ever to strike the United States.
The bibliography, the most
valuable reference book on the subject since The Civil War Day by Day,
will be essential for college and university libraries, dealers in rare
and secondhand books, and Civil War buffs.