"Benjamin Franklin Cooling has produced a triumphant third
volume to his definitive study of Tennessee and Kentucky in the
Civil War. Like his first two volumes, this one perfectly
integrates the home front and battlefield, demonstrating that
civilians were continually embroiled in the war in intense ways
comparable to and often surpassing the violence experienced by
soldiers on the battlefield. The impacts of armies, guerrillas, and
other military forces on civilians was continual, terrifying, and
brutal in nearly all parts of the Confederacy's Heartland." --T.
Michael Parrish, Linden G. Bowers Professor of American History,
Baylor University
"Cooling's scholarship is indeed sound and based on extensive
research in a variety of original sources that range from
manuscript collections to newspapers, with an exhaustive list of
secondary sources. His work represents the first new
interpretations of this important part of the war in decades."
--Archie P. McDonald, Regent's Professor and Community Liaison,
Stephen F. Austin State University
In two preceding volumes, Forts Henry and Donelson and Fort
Donelson's Legacy, Benjamin Franklin Cooling offered a sweeping
portrayal of war and society in the upper southern heartland of
Kentucky and Tennessee during the first two and a half years of the
Civil War. This book continues that saga as Cooling probes the
profound turmoil--on the battlefield, on the home front, within the
shadow areas where lawlessness reigned--that defined the war in the
region as it ground to its close.
By 1864 neither the Union's survival nor the South's independence
was any more apparent than at the beginning of the war. The grand
strategies of both sides were still evolving, and Tennessee and
Kentucky were often at the cusp of that work. With his customary
command of myriad sources, Cooling examines the heartland conflict
in all its aspects: the Confederate cavalry raids and Union
counteroffensives; the harsh and punitive Reconstruction policies
that were met with banditry and brutal guerrilla actions; the
disparate political, economic, and sociocultural upheavals; the
ever-growing war weariness of the divided populations; and the
climactic battles of Franklin and Nashville that ended the
Confederacy's hopes in the Western Theater. Especially notable in
this volume is Cooling's use of the latest concepts of "hybrid" or
"compound war" that national security experts have applied to the
twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--a mode of
analysis that explores how catastrophic terrorism and disruptive
lawlessness mix with traditional combat and irregular operations to
form a new kind of warfare. Not only are such concepts relevant to
the historical study of the Civil War in the heartland, Cooling
suggests, but by the same token, their illumination of historical
events can only enrich the ways in which policymakers view
present-day conflicts.
In chronicling Tennessee and Kentucky's final rite of passage from
war to peace, To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond
is in every way a major contribution to Civil War literature by a
masterful historian.
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