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Barton A. Myers is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University. Fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the North Caroliniana Society are among his other honors.

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The author has delivered an account of Union sympathizers during the War of the Rebellion in North Carolina which is something of a curate's egg. The book begins with an unpromising introduction taken up mostly with extravagant boasting about how his book is going to correct America's ignorance of the topic, a result of generations of Lost Cause oriented historians and their determination to sweep the topic under the rug. That such historians existed I have no doubt, but since said Union sympathizers were given a bit of time on a wildly popular television series a quarter-century ago and have inspired two A-list movies since, his attitude seems anachronistic at best. For that matter, I was reading about Appalachian Union sympathizers when I was in second grade. Jack Kennedy was president.

The body of the book, though, is a model of historical scholarship, obviously thoroughly researched and documented, and backed up with fine and deep appendices and bibliography. Readability is moderate; the author's odd syntax lends itself to sentences which either contain or appear to contain frequent lacunae and nonsequiters. More to this reader's point, his narrative is largely anecdote-driven by a worm's-eye-view of innumerable poultry confiscations, beatings, whippings, hangings, and loud death threats which I found repetitive. When he gets back to the larger picture, as in his good descriptions of state politics and even better coda which follows the postwar fates of a few of his Unionists and an account of a historiographical feud between Virginians and North Carolinians, it's compelling reading. The book's editors were sloppy; too many spelling and homonym errors have slipped through, and, above all, the book needs a county outline map. I doubt that even North Carolinians know their counties well enough to follow all of his many references, and the rest of us are left in total darkness.
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½
 
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Big_Bang_Gorilla | Mar 22, 2018 |

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Teokset
2
Jäseniä
35
Suosituimmuussija
#405,584
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 2.5
Kirja-arvosteluja
1
ISBN:t
10