New Confederate Faces Review

The Faces of the Confederacy review by C.D. Myers of McClatchy-Tribune News Service begins with the story of Capt. Jesse Cunningham McNeill, the soldier who transforms from petulant subordinate officer to daring raider responsible for the capture of a pair of federal generals.

It is fitting that Myers led with McNeill's story, for it exemplifies the many untold and largely forgotten stories of the Civil War period.

Myers adds:

This exceptional companion edition to Coddington's 2004 book, "Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories," reconstructs the lives of 77 Confederate soldiers below the rank of colonel, through engaging narratives complemented by rare carte-de-visite (CDV) portrait photographs.

This review has been widely published online, including the Kansas City Star and The (Columbia, S.C.) State.

ACRL Reviews Confederate Faces

George Eberhart of the Association of College & Research Libraries recently reviewed Confederate Faces. He writes:

"Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories, by Ronald S. Coddington (320 pages, December 2008), brings to life the fragmented backgrounds of 82 Confederate soldiers pictured on cartes de visite of the 1860s. Coddington has hit upon a unique and fascinating niche in the seemingly endless march of Civil War books. This one is a sequel to his Faces of the Civil War (2004), which matched the images of ordinary Union privates, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains with brief memoirs of their war experiences. With Southern veterans the documentary trail is much harder to pick up, making the author's biographical vignettes all the more extraordinary. The earnestness, defiance, and desperation on the faces of these men resonates with a modern audience, once their stories are known."

Confederate Faces is a History Book Club selection

Faces of the Confederacy is one of the January selections of the History Book Club.

Web 5.0

Spent time over the past week redesigning the web site. The old design had a limited navigation bar that had outgrown its usefulness as I've added a number of new features and links during the past couple years. A major change is moving from a Flash-based environment to HTML, which is helpful for search engine optimization and text display.

New features include a page dedicated to purchasing signed copies of both books.