Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More Than 100 True Stories

In more than 100 brief vignettes, Military History magazine editor Kelly covers a range of Civil War-era people, events and curiosities that readers likely never learned in history class, including the venomous temper of Mary Todd Lincoln, the Alabama county that remained loyal to the U.S. and threatened to secede from the state, and the siege of Petersburg, Vir., that saw rats, cats and even dogs make their way into residents' stewpots. Breaking their book into generally-chronological sections-Beginnings, Middles, and Endings-Kelly gives his hodge-podge a welcome sense of continuity within the context of the war, while individual entries effectively place readers in the times, providing tremendous insight to the daily lives of Americans during the mid-1800s. Coloring the most overwhelming conflict of American history in startling, intimate hues, these anecdotes make for a more immediate, and less forgettable, history lesson than many traditional Civil War narratives.