The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996 Page: 283
626 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Book Reviews
the twentieth century. As a result, Wolfe, concludes, women have been and
remain second-class citizens in the South.
Wolfe handles her subject with remarkable skill. A Southerner by birth and
heritage, she brings to it an understanding derived from her background. Her
reference point is the symbolic Southern lady, and she sees the South, despite its
strains of continuity, as a "swirling array of kaleidoscopic images" (p. 7). Her
book, although broadly chronological, catches those images.
She also brings to the task a wide knowledge of the pertinent literature. The
book quotes frequently from other scholars, making portions of it a bibliograph-
ical guide to the subject. In addition, she has spiked it with anecdotes, all of
them entertaining and some derived from her family and students. As a whole,
the book is a mixture of syntheses and specifics.
The overriding problem with the book is its scope. One cannot fault it for giv-
ing only passing notice to peripheral states such as Texas, for too much is
already crammed into too few pages. Ideas crowd upon ideas with scant develop-
ment, and anecdote follows anecdote at a rapid pace, at times requiring the
reader to turn back a few pages to pick up the line of thought.
Wolfe has the material to fill several volumes this size, if she had proceeded at
a more leisurely Southern pace.
Huntsville MARILYN MCADAMS SIBLEY
The War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville. By James Lee McDonough.
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+386. Illustrations,
maps, bibliography, footnotes, index. ISBN 0-87049-847-9. $32.00.)
George E. Pickett's ill-starred assault on the Union center at Gettysburg is
commonly considered "the high tide of the Confederacy." The South's best
hope of winning its independence, however, came-and went-some ten
months earlier, in the autumn of 1862. Then a general strategic offensive, car-
ried out in the East by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and in the
West by Braxton Bragg's Army of Mississippi, offered a substantial but ultimately
fruitless opportunity for a decisive military conclusion to the Civil War. Both
campaigns ebbed after bloody but indecisive fighting, with Lee withdrawing into
Virginia after Sharpsburg (September 17, 1862) and Bragg into Tennessee after
Perryville (October 8, 1862).
Bragg, although supported by Jefferson Davis, was condemned for abandon-
ing the strategic offensive within seventy miles of the Ohio River after fighting a
battle that his officers and men believed they had won. The Confederates had in
fact driven the Federals back more than a mile at Perryville and inflicted some
forty-two hundred casualties while sustaining fewer than thirty-five hundred
(including the capture of one of this reviewer's hapless forebears).
Viewed as two halves of a single strategic conception, the Maryland and
Kentucky campaigns appear equally worthy of the historian's notice. The
Confederate effort in the West, however, has long been overshadowed by the far
greater appeal of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Sharpsburg has, of283
1995
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 99, July 1995 - April, 1996, periodical, 1996; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101217/m1/331/?rotate=0: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.