University of Tennessee Press Publishes Western Theater

By Thomas Wells · Originally published November 2017 · p. 29

The University of Tennessee Press has always had a strong list in Civil War studies. Appropriately, given our location, our leading-edge scholarship has concentrated on the Western Theater. Back in 1977, James Lee McDonough produced Shiloh: In Hell before Night, the first in a series of books about battles and campaigns encompassing Stones River, Franklin, Chattanooga, and Nashville, that helped galvanize interest in the West and represented a thirty-year publishing commitment between the author and the press. In a similar vein, Benjamin Franklin Cooling kicked off a trilogy of books about the war in Tennessee and Kentucky: Forts Henry and Donelson (1988), Fort Donelson’s Legacy (1997), and To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond (2011), that offer significant new interpretations based on Cooling’s characteristic mixture of social and campaign history. In 1994, the Press inaugurated the Voices of the Civil War series which devoted itself to annotated and edited primary works. These types of works have become a veritable cottage industry among university presses since, but we were one of the earliest to dedicate a series to publishing them. To date, well over 70 volumes, representing the perspectives of ordinary soldiers, women left behind to safeguard their families as their husbands and brothers went off to war, various engineers, sailors, prisoners, generals, and even a former slave, have appeared under the editorship of founder Frank Byrne, Peter S. Carmichael, and now Michael P. Gray. We are proud that this series is doing its part to contribute a deep and fine grain to our understanding of the conflict. In addition to these innovative publishing lines, the Press has long embraced what is now fashionably referred to as the “Long Civil War.” Largely because of related disciplinary commitments to material culture and historical archaeology, the Press has published award-winning titles in Civil War and memory. One of the first and most influential volumes in this field we published was Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson’s edited volume Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003), and other notable related volumes include Brian Miller’s John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory (2010) and Jennifer Murray’s recent On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park (2014). Back in 2006, the prolific Timothy B.

Smith published a complementary volume, The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield, which was the first of several books he published with us to grapple with war and its remembrance, including The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation (2008), A Chickamauga Memorial (2009), and Rethinking Shiloh: Myth and Memory (2013). To cap off his amazing work in this area, Smith has just published what is likely to be the best single-volume synthesis of Civil War battlefield preservation history for a very long time to come: Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861–2015 (2017). Partly in recognition of its emphasis on the Western Theater, the Press started The Western Theater in the Civil War series in 2007 under the editorship of Gary D. Joiner. One of the first recruits to the series was Lawrence L. Hewitt who, along with coeditor Arthur W. Bergeron, was plotting a series of multi-author volumes that would vastly reevaluate commanders in the West. Under the umbrella title of Confederate Generals in the Western Theater, this series within a series has so far produced four outstanding volumes that have reconsidered the careers of generals both famous, like Joseph E. Johnston, and obscure. (Pop quiz: what do you know about Mansfield Lovell?) Along with Thomas E. Schott, who became coeditor after Art Bergeron’s untimely passing, Hewitt also put together two volumes in a related Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, and a third is about to go to press. In addition to producing cutting-edge scholarship, the Press has also reached out to more general audiences, largely thanks to the efforts of the indefatigable Matt Spruill. Beginning with Storming the Heights: A Guide to the Battle of Chattanooga (2003), Spruill and his collaborators have turned out invaluable guidebooks to Stones River, The Seven Days Battles, Gettysburg, and the Second Battle of Manassas. In a new venture, Spruill and rising star Larry Peterson have been recruiting authors for a series of programmatic books that focus on battlefield decision-making. Under the series moniker Command Decisions in America’s Civil War, these books will serve as introductions to the battles focusing, not on what transpired, but why the course of the battle unfolded as it did and how decisions made by U.S. and C.S. officers alike influenced the battle’s progression. Four books are already slated to appear in the series: Spruill’s own

Decisions at Stones River and Decisions at Second Manassas (fall 2017), Dave Powell’s Decisions at Chickamauga (spring 2018), and Larry Peterson’s Decisions at Chattanooga (summer 2018). Forthcoming books in the series will investigate decisions made at Perryville, Tullahoma, Shiloh, and other notable battles, two planned campaign books on Vicksburg, and Larry Peterson’s Decisions at Atlanta. In the wake of the sesquicentennial, we realize that scholars are reflecting on the shape and future of the field in sometimes surprisingly agonizing ways. Our view is that self-reflection is a good thing, but there are plenty of reasons to think that the state of Civil War publishing remains strong and much work remains to be done. What are we looking for? Innovative scholarship on the Western Theater, in particular; work that broadens interpretation beyond the boundaries of military history into attempting to get at the war in all its fullness; authors who have a vision that may require years and several books to realize. As you can see with multiple publications from the likes of McDonough, Cooling, Smith, Spruill, and Peterson, we like to keep our authors. Thomas Wells is Acquisitions Editor for UTP.