Book Review: A Deeper Look at the Confederate Soldier

"Faces of the Confederacy is an indispensable new window on the Civil War and the society that fought it," writes Dr. John L.S. Daley in a review of my book that has just appeared in the Civil War Book Review by the Louisiana State University Libraries' Special Collections.

Daley, an associate professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Pittsburg State University in southeastern Kansas, mentioned a number of details that other reviewers passed by, including this opening line: "Consciously taking cues from Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, Ronald S. Coddington has presented history as a sum of individual experiences in this collection of seventy-seven short biographies of Confederate soldiers..."

Daley compares the book to Bell J. Wiley's classic, The Life of Johnny Reb (1962), and adds a paragraph that accurately reflects my research: "The Internet and Interlibrary Loan have allowed Coddington to tread where Wiley and other predecessors could not. While awaiting responses to his Civil War Message Board Portal and GenForum.com queries, he mined Ancestry.com, digitized Library of Congress records and pension files in state archives. On-site research in the Library of Congress and National Archives turned up service records, as did the Southern Historical Society Papers, newspapers and regimental histories. Even with internet help, it took him an average of two months to piece together each life.

I am particularly pleased with this review. You can read the complete version on my web site, or view the original on the Civil War Book Review.