The Wikipedia Legends Of The Civil War: The Incredible Of The 75 Most Fascinating Figures From The War Between The States, by the editors Of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

This book is a very bad book, but bad of a specific type and for a specific reason. The editors who made this compendium of what they view (badly) to be the 75 most compelling people who have wikipedia entries relating to their Civil War experience are so skittish and shy about taking credit as editors that they make a somewhat aggressive copyright claim without having any copyrighted material to claim–it is all material copied and slightly edited from wikipedia.org–while also remaining anonymous. There are at least three ways in which this book is particularly bad. For one, its title seeks to pander to both Northern and Southern audiences, which are differently served by the wikipedia articles, which are generally edited by those who can be considered to have certain agendas. For another, the choice of articles is terrible, which I will describe in more detail shortly, and also reflect their own unfortunate agenda on the part of the book’s timid editors. Third, and most seriously, this book is the sort that I could have “written” easily myself, and indeed anyone with basic copy and pasting skills could have, as the book only cites the wikipedia pages it takes from and not any of the internal citations that are included in the articles copied, making it nearly entirely worthless as a source for readers. It is difficult to see how exactly this book is to be enjoyed by the reader, and the laziness of its production makes it a foreboding hint of a glut of such books to come.

This book is about 500 pages or so in length and consists of 75 wikipedia entries about people–not about battles or anything else–that are edited to reflect their Civil War life as well as their death, usually. So, what kind of people are the sorts that the editors think of as being the most interesting and influential figures of the Civil War? Some of the choices are obvious–important military and political leaders are here: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Grant, Sherman, Lee, Thomas, Jackson, Longstreet, McClellan, Hooker, Meade, Stuart, Farragut, Forrest, Hill, Bragg, Johnston, Beauregard, and others like them. If you commanded one of the major armies or were one of the major corps commanders in either army, you have a good chance of being here. But even here there are plenty of omissions–no Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, or Governor Brown of Georgia, a noted antagonist of Davis with regards to states rights, nor Samuel Curtis, hero of Pea Ridge and Westport, nor the reliable Canby of New Mexico and Mobile. So, who is included here instead: if you are a figure well-regarded for Black History Month, you have a good chance of being on here. If you are a cross-dressing soldier, you stand a very good chance. If you were a spy or part of the conspiracy to murder Lincoln, you also stand a good chance of being included. Whether or not this is a good judgment of what is influential, interesting, or fascinating is something I leave up to each individual reader to judge for themselves.

What makes this book bad in a particularly insidious way is that the avoidance of any actual editing or writing on the part of the books’ supposed authors is a way of weaseling out of writing with any particular tone that would betray the authors’ own perspective on the materials included for reasons of pandering to “modern audiences” and their worldviews. Why some obscure cross-dressing Confederate soldier of Cuban birth is more important than supreme court justices, cabinet officers, governors, generals in obscure fronts, or even someone who helped codify the laws of war for the Union, and others noted above is a real mystery. The only way to know what the editors of the book are trying to do is to examine the people they include as important, and that indicates a presentism that focuses on questions of identity politics rather than any sort of genuine historical merit. The editors likely consider a certain amount of focus on figures to be absolutely essential to gaining support of the mainstream Civil War fan, and do not know enough about the Civil War to include more obscure figures that are nonetheless of considerable importance and influence, and so they end up focusing on predictable subject matters likely to get the book a higher ESG score.