Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/March 2023/Book reviews




 * By Hog Farm

The University of North Carolina Press is a big player in publishing scholarly works in the United States about the American Civil War, and Thomas W. Cutrer is a well-respected scholar. I truly don't know what went wrong here.

A few months ago, I purchased a used copy of Theater of a Separate War from an independent bookseller, and began reading it recently, with great anticipation. The book is a single-volume treatment of the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War, which is very under-studied. The most comparable modern work might be Josephy's The Civil War in the American West (which focuses more on the Plains Tribes), or Kerby's Kirby's Smith's Confederacy, published in the '70s by the University of Alabama, but even that has a narrower scope. A book with Theater of a Separate War's scope was greatly needed when it was published in 2017.

My first sign that something had gone wrong here was a paragraph in the introduction - after appearing on one page, it then appeared again in duplicate form a couple of pages later, with no obvious reason for the duplication. Between this and a few grammar/tense errors and a sentence fragment, I just assumed that the copy-editor had either had too much or too little coffee that day. Greater concern came on p. 43, where a Confederate officer was stated to have crossed the Missouri River when the context was a clear reference to the Mississippi River. I'm probably most familiar with the ACW activities in Missouri, eastern Kansas, and northern Arkansas. As such, it struck me the wrong way when p. 54 gave the wrong month for the Sacking of Osceola, although the date was given correctly a few pages later. Around this same location, on p. 52, was another point - this time one that I cannot figure out what the intended meaning was. While describing events occurring during John C. Frémont's 1861 command of Union troops in Missouri, a reference was made to the "Second Confiscation Act of 17 July 1862" being enforced. Frémont had been transferred out of Missouri long before the Second Confiscation Act of 17 July 1862 had been promulgated, so I have no clue what this is intended to refer to.

Having already seen these points, it raised my eyebrows to see a reference on p. 63 to Jim Lane's Kansas Jayhawkers burning the town of Papinville, Kansas. This seemed unusual to me, as Lane's people (same folks involved in the aforementioned Osceola incident) tended to restrict their destroying to places in Missouri. Some brief searching has confirmed my belief that the reference to "Papinville, Kansas" is an error for Papinville, Missouri. What essentially proved to be the last straw for me was a reference on p. 68 to "Fort Donaldson", when the context was a clear reference to Fort Donelson, the sort of error that makes anyone familiar with the Western Theater of the American Civil War cringe to see in a serious scholarly work. This will be the first book in several years that I have begun reading and not finished. Given the number of errors I found in material that I am familiar with, I don't trust myself to catch all of the similar things that are presumably found in the coverage of events in southern Louisiana and Texas, on which I am not well read.

That said, in the parts of the book I did read, I found the larger items to be accurate and a well-reasoned and informed overview of events, the detailed description of the secession of Texas being a highlight for me.

UNC's website indicates that they are intending to publish a "Revised Edition" paperback edition in May 2023. After a brief email correspondence, Dr. Cutrer informed me that he had passed these errata on to his editor, with the hope that they can be corrected in time to be reflected in the paperback edition. It's good that these will be revised, but this should have been caught in the pre-publishing process, not six years later. This book has a lot of potential, but to quote the Turnpike Troubadours, "the devil's in the fine details".

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