Book Notes

BOOK NOTES North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster. Edited by Louis H. Manarin. (Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1966. Pp. xvii, 691. $12.00.) Researchers of North Carolina soldiers have long suffered under the handicap of having to use either Walter A. Clark's superficial Histories of the Several Regiments ... or John W. Moore's error-filled Roster of North Carolina Troops. ... In the early stages of the Civil War Centennial, the North Carolina Centennial Commission established a new and complete roster as one of its major goals. The Commission's choice of an editor was stellar, for Louis H. Manarin has pursued his awesome task with even more punctiliousness than he displayed in editing The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee. No one has examined and correlated more meticulously the mountains of muster rolls and individual service records in the National Archives. Dr. Manarin has also gleaned additional material from every known public and private source. The result is a roster than approaches the ideal. This first of twelve proposed volumes gives a descriptive listing of men who served in the state's fifty-three artillery companies. The unavoidably high cost of the volume may deter some potential purchasers, but the cost is cheap when compared to the contents. Democracy on Trial: 1845-1877. Edited by Robert W. Johannsen. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Pp. x, 405. $2.95.) This is volume four of A Documentary History of American Life, under the general editorship of David Donald. The series is designed for variety and "pedagogical usefulness" and the individual editors have selected their materials on this basis. In the present volume a number of literary selections and diary entries relieve the standard pohtical and economic documents. Perhaps if examinations are devised skillfully enough, the students will read the poetry, also. Problems in American History: Through Reconstruction. Edited by Richard W. Leopold, Arthur S. Link, and Stanley Coben. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966. Pp. xii, 436. $4.95.) Civil War and reconstruction receive short shrift in this volume. The editors are not necessarily to be blamed for their choice of emphasis, as 94 this collection is designed for college survey courses and as a supplement to a textbook. The chapters are characterized by lack of imagination, except for the one entiUed, "Why Did the Union Win the Civil War?" The Age of Civil War and Reconstruction, 1830-1900: A Book of Interpretive Essays. Edited by Charles Crowe. (Homewood, IlL: Dorsey Press, 1966. Pp. x, 479. $6.60. ) The editor's aim in this volume is to "present modem scholarship as it emerged from its own antecedents and precedents; to provide key interpretive essays and major presentations of new evidence from both senior and junior scholars on the grand issues of Civil War and Reconstruction." He has succeeded admirably. The range and quality of these essays render them invaluable for all students of the era. College students will find in them a lucid introduction to the recent literature of the middle period and more advanced scholars will be pleased to have these essays collected in one volume. Professor Crowe's introductory remarks are excellent and his comments upon the standard procedure for compiling anthologies should be read by all would-be editors, (p. vii). Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865-1906. Edited by Walter L. Fleming. Foreword by David Donald. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Pp. xx, 493 [Vol. I], XIV, 480 [Vol. II], $4.90.) In his foreword David Donald writes: "For all its imperfections, Fleming 's Documentary History is today, as it has been for fifty years, the broadest and best balanced collection of original sources on the Reconstruction era." Many will agree; even those appalled by Fleming's open white supremacy attitude should not spite themselves by refusing to utilize this collection. Aside from the documents themselves the collection is useful as social history, revealing as it does the mind of a pioneer historian of reconstruction and the South, a historian greatly influenced, if not moulded, by William A. Dunning and the reconstruction milieu. Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854-1890. By Paul Wallace Gates. (New...