Prison Pens presents the memoir of a captured Confederate soldier in northern Virginia and the letters he exchanged with his fiancee during the Civil War. Wash Nelson and Mollie Scollay's letters, as well as Nelson's own manuscript memoir, provide rare insight into a world of intimacy, despair, loss, and reunion in the Civil War South. The tender voices in the letters combined with Nelson's account of his time as a prisoner of war provide a story that is personal and political, revealing the daily life of those living in the Confederacy and the harsh realities of being an imprisoned soldier. Ultimately, through the juxtaposition of the letters and memoir, Prison Pens provides an opportunity for students and scholars to consider the role of memory and incarceration in retelling the Confederate past and incubating Lost Cause mythology.,br> This book will be accompanied by a digital component: a website that allows students and scholars to interact with the volume's content and sources via an interactive map, digitized letters, and special lesson plans.

While prayer is generally understood as "communion with God" modern forms of spirituality prefer "communion" that is non-petitionary and wordless. This preference has unduly influenced modern scholarship on historic methods of prayer particularly concerning Anglo-Saxon spirituality. In Compelling God, Stephanie Clark examines the relationship between prayer, gift giving, the self, and community in Anglo-Saxon England. Clark's analysis of the works of Bede, Aelfric, and Alfred utilizes anthropologic and economic theories of exchange in order to reveal the ritualized, gift-giving relationship with God that Anglo-Saxon prayer espoused. Anglo-Saxon prayer therefore should be considered not merely within the usual context of contemplation, rumination, and meditation but also within the context of gift exchange, offering, and sacrifice. Compelling God allows us to see how practices of prayer were at the centre of social connections through which Anglo-Saxons conceptualized a sense of their own personal and communal identity.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in Civil War sharpshooters. Now there is a new perspective on the subject in the story of Major William E. Simmons (1839-1931), with emphasis on his experiences as an infantry officer in the Army of Northern virginia. Three years after graduating from Emory College, Simmons joined the first company in his home county and received his commission. He was later promoted to Captain in the elite 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters of Wofford's Brigade. In 1864, he became acting commander of the brigade's sharpshooter battalion. The book traces his family heritage and his footsteps from childhood to Emory College, through many challenging war encounters, his capture and imprisonment at Fort Delaware, and a lifetime of service to his state and community that lasted until the 1930s. A wealth of information from Simmons' journal and personal papers includes encounters with Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and George Armstrong Custer. There are also accounts of his miraculous escape from Crampton's Gap at South Mountain, his regiment's heroic efforts at the Bloody Lane in the Battle of Sharpsburg, the Sunken road at Fredericksburg, the peach Orchard and Wheat Field at Gettysburg, and his sharpshooters' key role at Cold Harbor and Wofford's flank attack at the Wilderness. To provide more in-depth information on Simmons' sharpshooter battalion, Byrd provides maps, letters, photographs, and a roster of soldiers compiled from service records and twenty-five other reference sources.

SILENT NIGHT brings to life one of the most unlikely and touching events in the annals of war. In the early months of WWI, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides left their trenches, laid down their arms, and joined in a spontaneous celebration with their new friends, the enemy. For a brief, blissful time, remembered since in song and story, a world war stopped. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible. Germans placed candle-lit Christmas trees on trench parapets and warring soldiers sang carols. In the spirit of the season they ventured out beyond their barbed wire to meet in No Man's Land, where they buried the dead in moving ceremonies, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and joyously played football, often with improvised balls. The truce spread as men defied orders and fired harmlessly into the air. But, reluctantly, they were forced to re-start history's most bloody war. SILENT NIGHT vividly recovers a dreamlike event, one of the most extraordinary of Christmas stories.