Fans pick 91 books like Civil War Stories

I love this historical novel (set in the battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War) so much that I have read it several times. Each time, it is a sleep robber; it is really hard for me to put it down. It is beautifully written, but it is hard to put down because I find beautiful nuggets of gold about leadership with a small “L” every time I read it.

My favorite character is Joshua Chamberlain, an obscure colonel who led a regiment of Maine volunteers. He has power, but he does not use it to coerce or dominate his troops. He uses it to activate the power that is in them! And they do incredible things at a critical point in the battle. 

“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met Stowe. The quote may be apocryphal, but it points to a truth about the 1852 novel that shaped American opinions about the cruelty and injustice of slavery. The writing is a bit melodramatic for modern sensibilities, but it’s hard to beat the scene in which the escaped slave Eliza tries to carry her young son across an icy river for freedom on the other side.

A stone-cold classic in war writing, I studied this short novel at university and loved it. Crane never actually went to war and yet his depiction of men fighting in the American Civil War felt so real, that it gave me the confidence to write historical fiction, knowing I’d never experienced these things but my research and imagination could be brought to bear and hopefully transport the reader in the same way Crane did. It also began a lifelong obsession for me with the American Civil War. When I first started writing historical novels I knew I wanted to write about other combat arenas than the two C20th world wars, choosing the Boer War and The Seven Years’ War respectively. 

Catton was one of the Civil War’s great historians, best known for bringing the stories of individual soldiers into otherwise sweeping accounts of the American Iliad. Amid this work, he also wrote this little-known short novel, published in 1955, which today probably would be filed in the “young adult” section of your favorite bookstore. It tells the tale of Bob Hayden, a Michigan boy who lies about his age to join a volunteer company and rises to manhood while serving in Virginia with Gen. “Fighting Phil” Sheridan.

How has war changed and damaged the environment?

How has nature influenced war and how have these changes presented? These kinds of basic questions make everyone interested in environmental history of war think.

This comprehensive book is easy to read but it provides valuable insights to the interaction between societies and nature from pre-colonial India to post-war Japan and serves as an excellent introduction to the field.

The American Civil War is everywhere, yet nowhere in William Faulkner’s fiction. This book explores the history of Yoknapatawpha County and the fiction of William Faulkner’s Civil War. It is a fascinating exploration of historical memory, race-making, narrative construction, and the South during and after Sherman.

Like The Dawn Watch, I especially loved it because it was neither a history book nor a work of literary analysis. If you have read Faulkner, this is an essential book that helps you understand how all of this is really about the Civil War, even though you’ll find very little gunfire in those pages. The pain is nowhere because it is everywhere. 

Although many (even most) historians relegate religion to the periphery of the history of the war, Nichols-Belt shows it to be a critical ingredient of that history. Moreover, although historians who admit the importance of religion to the South’s conduct of the war, most of them focus primarily on the armies in the East. Nichols-Belt shines a light on the just-as-important influence of religion in the armies of the Western theater, specifically the Army of Tennessee.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have been interested in the story of Sallie, a bullterrier who became the mascot of the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry. (I have an ancestor who fought with the 11th Pennsylvania, which is how I first became aware of Sallie’s story.)

The illustrations in this book are delightful as the author tells the story of when Sallie first joined the 11th until she was killed in battle in Virginia several years later. Today, she is memorialized at Gettysburg National Military Park. Visitors often leave dog biscuits at her statue.

This book includes 11 essays by an all-star cast of historians. It goes well beyond the military events of the war and covers the impact of the war on various groups of people. The essays discuss previously unexplored topics ranging from the wartime experiences of Texas women to the impact of the war on German immigrants. It also includes essays discussing the post-war impact of the conflict. Of particular interest is Carl H. Moneyhon’s essay on the reaction of Texans to Confederate defeat. This is not only an important book, but will also be interesting even to casual history lovers.

When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.