The Civil War is a perennial staple for publishers of war and military titles and, with the 150th anniversary of the start of that war occurring in April, publishers are gearing up to offer even more books on the topic.

After 150 years the Civil War still holds a central place in our history and national self-understanding," says Library of America publisher Max Rudin. "It's our greatest national drama—our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in ‘a new birth of freedom.' "

In 1990, Ken Burns's nine-week PBS series The Civil War attracted 40 million viewers and was honored with more than 40 film and TV awards; it will be rerun beginning in April. And in March, Knopf will reissue its companion volume to the series, The Civil War: An Illustrated History. The title sold 1,131,000 copies—more than 800,000 of those in hardcover—during its first go-round.

Also coming from Knopf is a new title, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (Apr.), which is slated for a 35,000-copy first print. Author Adam Goodheart has been blogging for the "Disunion" blog on the New York Times Web site (opinionator
.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/) since fall 2010. There, his posts and those of the other bloggers routinely elicit dozens, sometimes hundreds, of responses—an additional indicator of this topic's significant market.

A Serious Commitment

Indeed, interest in the Civil War is running so high that two publishers, Oxford University Press and Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, are publishing four new titles apiece to mark the sesquicentennial of the start of the conflict.

Timothy Bent, Oxford executive editor, trade, says that the interest in this particular war "seems an expression of the recognition that the Civil War truly was the crucible of the American identity." The publisher already has 10 backlist titles on the subject (including four by James M. McPherson, among them Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1989). One of the OUP quartet is The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union by John Lockwood and Charles Lockwood (Mar.). Bent asserts, "Of course there will be new books on Gettysburg and the Emancipation Proclamation. But there will also be some surprises"—like this look at the first two weeks after the fall of Sumter, when it was widely believed that the capital would fall to the Confederacy. In The Dogs of War: 1861 (Apr.), Emory M. Thomas examines misunderstandings on both sides of the conflict, including the belief that the war would end quickly. Also new from Oxford are The Civil War: A Concise History by Louis P. Masur (Jan.) and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War by William L. Barney (June).

Steve Culpepper, executive director of editorial at Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, says, "Why is the Civil War so fascinating to us? Well, for one, it's our very own war, ours and ours only. And the land where this all happened isn't in old Europe or the South Pacific—it's right under our feet and all around us. We can't get away from the Civil War, and we won't."

Generals South, Generals North: The Commanders of the Civil War Reconsidered by Alan Axelrod (Lyons, Mar.) highlights 24 figures. Explains Culpepper, "Each general is ranked with a movie review–like one- to four-star rating, ranking them from ‘a losing commander' to ‘a standout commander.' It's not a gimmick, however. The rankings are the result of the author's assessment of each general's reputation at the time, his impact on the war, and the opinions of today's Civil War historians and researchers."

According to Culpepper, The Big Book of Civil War Sites: From Fort Sumter to Appomattox, a Visitor's Guide to the History, Personalities, and Places of America's Battlefields, edited by Cynthia Parzych (Globe Pequot, Feb.), is "a literal road map of the war," complete with hotel and restaurant recommendations. Also in the pipeline are Brady's Civil War: A Collection of Civil War Images Photographed by Matthew Brady and His Assistants by Webb Garrison (Lyons, Mar.) and The Civil War 150: An Essential To-Do List for the 150th Anniversary by the Civil War Trust (Lyons, May.

An Ambitious Project

Library of America associate publisher Brian McCarthy calls The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It, "perhaps the most ambitious project in our 30-year history." Edited by Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, the work—which went on sale February 3—is the first volume in a four-volume series, published with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Four years in the making, it offers first-person narratives of the war years drawn from diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and other sources. In the February/March issue of Bookforum, Pulitzer Prize–winner Daniel Walker Howe wrote, "The emphasis on primary sources goes a long way toward answering questions that posterity has debated about the Civil War during the past 150 years."

Publisher Max Rudin says, "The collection tells an unprecedented firsthand story of the war, drawing for the first time on the full range of contemporary voices and views, North and South, black and white, male and female, battlefront and home front."

Also marking the sesquicentennial, the press reissued in January its editions of the memoirs of Sherman and Grant as a two-volume boxed set. And on LOA's backlist is the $20 hardcover Poets of the Civil War, edited by J.D. McClatchy.

Museum Quality

Discovering the Civil War is being published this month by D Giles (dist. by ACC) in conjunction with an eponymous exhibit that opened at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., in November and will remain there through April. The exhibit will then travel to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; the Houston Museum of Natural Science; and the Durham Museum in Omaha.

The book, written by the exhibition team, features more than 250 letters, diaries, photos, maps, petitions, receipts, patents, amendments, and proclamations from the National Archives and includes some lesser known perspectives, such as the recollections of soldiers at Gettysburg, recorded when they gathered at the site on the occasion of the battle's 75th anniversary in 1938. Filmmaker Ken Burns contributes a foreword.

Bruce Bustard, senior curator, National Archives and Records Administration, says, "The archives holds what is probably the largest collection of original Civil War documents in the world. Many of these are landmarks, even icons, but millions of others are unknown or known only to scholars. This book—like the exhibit it was based on—invites readers to re-examine the war unfiltered, through the documents themselves."

A Fruitful Union

DK has teamed up with the venerable Smithsonian to produce The Civil War: A Visual History (Mar.), a heavily illustrated hardcover that comprises, says DK's U.K. managing editor Camilla Hallinan, "more than 500 contemporary artifacts, photographs, sketches, and other images."

Illustrated spreads include one on Lincoln's assassination, showing the hat he wore to the theater that night, the pistol used by Booth, and a copy of the reward poster. Text explains not only the events but the context, with "Before" and "After" boxes that paint the big picture.

James G. Barber, a historian at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and curator of the Smithsonian's own Civil War Web site (www.civilwar.si
.edu), served as editorial consultant and contributed the foreword for the title, which has been chosen as a main selection for both the History Book Club and the Military Book Club. Barber says that the audience for Civil War books "ranges from seven to 70," and Nancy Ellwood, editorial director, DK U.S., reports a large uptick in interest from customers in markets near battle sites.

Illustrated and Interactive

Battlefields of the Civil War: The Battles That Shaped America by Peter Cozzens (Carlton, Mar.; dist. by Sterling) discusses 26 of the key battles and campaigns of the war. Each one is described in text, but also through illustrations and a series of detailed maps with color keys, 10 of which can be removed for closer scrutiny.

Last year, Sterling also published For Us the Living: The Civil War in Paintings and Eyewitness Accounts by Pulitzer-nominated historian James I. Robertson Jr., with paintings by historical artist Mort Künstler. Says executive editor Barbara Berger, "Because Robertson's insightful text describes key events in each year of the conflict woven together with the words of those who lived through it, and Künst-ler's masterful paintings painstakingly recreate these scenes described in the text, For Us the Living gives readers the sense of being there."

Ready, Aim, Fire

As its title indicates, Guns of the Civil War by Dennis Adler (Zenith, Mar.) focuses on the firearms of the period, including photographs of the historic guns and b&w historical photos and maps.

Senior acquisitions editor Richard Kane says, "Technically, in terms of military science, the Civil War is a very interesting war. Early on, it resembles the pinnacle of classical warfare as practiced by Napoleon and Wellington. Later on, it becomes the first modern war, industrial warfare presaging what was to come in World War I. Technology in the form of improved weapons, both small arms and artillery, comes to have a significant impact on battles." Kane adds, "Many of the weapons shown in Guns of the Civil War are extremely rare and not found in museums and other collections that are open to the public. Some of these rare guns are very significant in terms of technological development, design, and manufacturing during the period."

Reissued for the Occasion

To mark the sesquicentennial, Abbeville Press will reissue a paperback edition of Great Civil War Heroes and Their Battles (Apr.). When first published in 1985, the book sold 34,500 copies and earned praise from PW, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Smithsonian Magazine, and many other publications. (It has been unavailable since 1991.) Some of the book's unusual aspects are color portraits of 50 generals with their biographies and lists of their battles, commands, ranks, and West Point classes; official uniforms of both sides, with representations of rank and grade insignia and buttons; and authentic drawings of all the major weaponry.

Walton Rawls, the book's editor (and a former Abbeville editor), says, "The prime audience for this book, as it was nearly a generation ago when it first came out, is the large group of military re-enactors—in the tens of thousands—and the countless members nationwide of Civil War roundtables. In Atlanta, for example, there are more than 300 active members. And there are the hundreds of thousands of buffs who read the books avidly and visit the battlefields."

An Authoritative History

The star of Rowman & Littlefield's spring list is the Civil War history This Great Struggle: America's Civil War by Steven E. Woodworth, a history professor at Texas Christian University. Woodworth has twice won the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York Civil War Round Table and was presented with a Grady McWhiney Award by the Dallas Civil War Round Table for his lifetime contribution to the study of Civil War history.

Executive editor Niels Aaboe says, "Woodworth is a veteran Civil War historian and very prolific, but in his previous work he tended to focus on western campaigns in the war. In this book he really emphasizes the importance of the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River and the battles fought there. He also emphasizes the issue of slavery as the only significant cause of the war. To this day there are some people who argue that it was a war over states' rights, but the argument here is that the only right Southern states were trying to maintain was the right to own and use slaves."

Aaboe says the upcoming sesquicentennial is "absolutely increasing interest in the topic; it certainly played a part in our decision to time this publication in April."

A New Perspective

"The Civil War was the ultimate identity crisis for the Republic, and the outcome redefined what America meant," says Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press. Coming in March is America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation by University of North Carolina history professor David Goldfield. Ginna says that the book—which garnered a starred PW review—offers a new outlook on the war and its meaning.

"Goldfield challenges the conventional tendency to paint the Civil War in a positive light because we approve of the outcome, and because we can't help wanting to justify so much carnage. Other historians suggest the war expiated the ‘original sin' of America's founding—the protection of slavery in the Constitution. But David asks whether the complete breakdown of our political system, the ravaging of the countryside and economy, and the death or maiming of over a million Americans is something that we should consider our greatest failure, not our finest hour. It's not a sunny view of the war, but I find it a bracing and thought-provoking one."

Southern Publishers on the War Between the States

The weather forecast for the night of January 25 in Atlanta, Ga., called for frigid temperatures and rain, with a high chance of snowfall before the night was through. It was therefore something of a shock for organizers at the Georgia Center for the Book when a crowd of 120 appeared for the first of its sesquicentennial events: authors Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell discussing their book, Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia, released last September from University of Georgia Press.

"We were blown away," says the center's executive director, Bill Starr, who remarks that his eight years at the center has taught him that "when there's bad weather forecast, crowds don't come out."

It's a testament to the hold that the Civil War has on the minds of Southerners; the same passion for the War Between the States (still referred to by some as the War of Northern Aggression) can be seen in the offerings of publishers throughout the South. Tom Post, the publicist for University of Tennessee Press, told PW he believes, "If it weren't for the Civil War, university presses in the South would be much smaller." Indeed, seven of Tennessee's 20 titles this season are Civil War histories, and the upcoming spring/summer 2011 catalogue touts "150 Years of the Civil War" on its cover; the press plans to feature the sesquicentennial in each of its catalogues over the next four years.

Post also notes that, though the Southern audience for Civil War history is a sizable niche, it's likely going to decline over the next few decades due to shifting demographics: "I have a feeling that the [increasing] Hispanic and Kurdish populations of Tennessee, they're not going to care about the Civil War. I'll be curious to see how things are at the bicentennial." That makes this anniversary especially vital for Civil War publishers in the South.

The History Press, an independent publisher in Charleston, S.C., got out in front of the big anniversary with its sesquicentennial series, marketed regionally in association with battlefield parks and other historical attractions. Started in 2009, the series currently boasts 17 volumes, with another dozen scheduled for this year, and more already on the books for 2012 and 2013. Each title, written by scholars who publishing director Adam Ferrell characterizes as "really plugged into the Civil War history community," focuses on a particular battle, campaign, or, in some cases, the experience of average citizens, as in the forthcoming Atlanta and the Civil War.

"We're really pleased with the series so far," says Ferrell, adding that the series' most recent release, December's Charleston Under Siege, has received quite a bit of attention locally. That volume's author, Douglas W. Bostick, will likely be a part of the National Council for History Education Conference in March on "The Causes and Consequences of Civil Wars," taking place in Charleston. Other authors have been busy reading and speaking in their books' local markets.

The Georgia Center for the Book, like other literary and historical organizations throughout the region, is busy completing its schedule of sesquicentennial events, in association with publishers, universities, and tourism boards, each aware of the anniversary's popularity but respectful of its gravity. Mindful that 620,000 Americans died during the war, the Georgia Center's Starr insists that its program is "a commemoration, not a celebration."—Marc Schultz