Customer Reviews

The Encyclopedia of Civil War Usage: An Illustrated Compendium of the Everyday Language of Soldiers and Civilians

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If my above mentioned words didn't offer what this book is about I don't know what will. Cheryl and Webb Garrison have assembled a great book featuring Civil War slang, lingo and material names. Words such as chinch (bed bug), hardware (weapon), leg case (desertion) pop-skull (whiskey) and yaller dog (coward). These are just a small few of the many words in this great book on Civil War era language. This book would be great for reenactors or anyone studying the war and learning more about how people communicated or gobble talked!

I purchased this book to help me understand the terms used during the Civil War for a history project I am working on. The book is easy to read and the terms that I needed where easy to find as well as suggestions for terms that went along with what I was looking for. It will be a great addition to my history part of my home library and the price was reasonable. The book has also spurred my interest in other subjects connected to some of the terms I found in the book. Great book for anyone working on the Civil War.

A helpful guide to words & phrases current in the Civil War. Entries, alphabetically arranged, are brief and concise, sometimes overly so. Military ceremonies are mainly ignored, and in one case not quite correct. Still, very useful to explain those obscure references one finds in diaries and newspaper accounts.

I had been using this book as a research tool for a story I'm writing, and it seems to be pretty useful. However, I found this entry:

"Lo. A nickname for Confederate Gen. Lewis A. Addison, a ladies man with a reputation of a Lothario. Gen. John B. Magruder allegedly coined the usage with regard to Addison."

This gave me pause, because I knew that Confederate General Lewis Armistead was also known as "Lo," short for "Lothario."

Did a bit of poking around, and while I can't find a General Addison anywhere, Lew Armistead's middle name is--Addison. Looks like someone (likely an editor) mixed the names around.

While this may seem nitpicking, it does present a problem for anyone using this book as a reference--if this one entry is wrong, are there other entries that are also wrong? So try to double check your information with other sources if historical accuracy is important to you.

This is a good resource for those interested in 19th Century speech, terminology and idiomatic expressions, particularly those associated with the US Civil War. The book lists words or phrases, explains the origin, and often gives an example, as many words and phrases functioned as both nouns and verbs.

As a resource for Civil War-era nautical language, this book is excellent.
Many of the terms in the book are nautical, which makes this book stand out from other books that relate to Civil War-era language. As I am not a Civil War re-enactor, I am not really qualified to recommend it as a resource for infantry or cavalry use, however, if I was re-enacting as part of the USA or CSA Navy, I would definitely consider this book a must-have.

An invaluable tool to help you understand change in word usage--excellent for reinactors, writers and scholars of the Civil War era.

This book could be devided into a few paphlets. 1. "Nicknames-Names of a Few Oficer's Horses, 2. "A few (very few) Forts and Prison Camps of the Civil War," 3. "Ships of the Civil War: or Some of Them," 4. "Nicknames of a Few General Officers: or How 'Wild Bill' and 'Mean Jack' Got Their Nicknames", 5. "Common Military Terms: What the Army Called it in 1862 is What They Still Call it Today," and so on and on and on. A good 90% of what's left are words are terms that a high school senior could determine by the context of their use. The bibliography seems longer than the book. Honestly, and I really mean this, this book appears to be words jotted down by a civil war student (a true scholar, even) while they were pouring through endless volumes of books, letters, etc, and a term came up that they did not INSTANTLY understand. Then these terms and phrases were collected for decades and dumped together in this book with a "definition." It almost appears to be a shameless attempt to put the scraps of a fading historian together, for the sole purpose of financial gain. This book is not worth YOUR money.

This is undoubtedly one of the greatest reference works about the American Civil War, written by one of the most renowned scholars in this field. The 2,500 entries range from 'A1' and 'abaft' to 'Zouave'. There is a rich collection of slang terms that represent the speech of both sides in the War as well as entries that refer to weapons and machines. There are also many nicknames of generals and high-ranking military officers (for which there are useful biographies provided)and eponymous phrases such as 'Sherman's neckties' and 'Sherman's sentinels' etc. There is also a great deal of information about places, battles, prisoner of war camps etc. This book will be enjoyed both by the historian and the linguist. Here one can find practically every term or phrase associated with this period of history. Admittedly if one scanned carefully in the Civil War section of Paul Dickson's excellent work 'War Slang' or in Robert Hendrickson's books 'Whistlin' Dixie' and 'Yankee Talk' then one may well come across the odd entry not incluuded here. However, this work constitutes the greatest colletion in a single volume.
As a non-American the American Civil War has always both interested me and bewildered me. It seems that popular opinion has often simplified the causes of the war. In the entry on 'Slavery' the authors declare that this was "not the only issue dividing the north from the south". Indeed, there were many other political and economic reasons. It is a fallacy to go on believing that the South was the side of the baddies who wanted slaves while the North were the goodies who wanted to free the slaves. The Americans had fought bravely to secure their own independence. It does not seem illogical why an extremely large section of the states should want to form their own country (that would have been analogous with Canada). If this was their wish they should have been allowed to do so. Perhaps the feeling between North and South would have been a lot different today if the South looked on the North as just a friendly neighbour (in the same way that Canada does) rather than holding a grievance. In the war both sides displayed heroism and both sides committed atrocities. The total cost in terms of human life makes the American Civil War one of the greatest tragedies of world history. As for the pretext about the slaves, this was just a pretext. If this had been such a vital issue then why in the aftermath of the war was there no legislation to make former slaves equal citizens. Even almost a century later the Afro-American (for whom this war was supposedly waged) was still treated as a second class citizen. In the 1950's there was still a system comparable with the South African 'apartheid' with black people not allowed to travel in the same bus compartment as whites. Even those black soldiers drafted in W.W.1. and W.W.2 were kept seperate in their own regiments. In the Vietnam war a disproportionately high percentage of black people were enlisted and were not allowed to use their 'dap' or 'soul handshake' for fear that it might form constitute some exclusive bond. Even today it is in the poor black neighbourhoods (not the luxurious tree-lined avenues where the senators live) that the military frequent to find expendable recruits for Iraq. In the new Iraq occupation some slighly black 'showcase' Afro-Americans like Colin Powell and Condolisa Rice have gained prominence and wealth. However, they do not represent the needs or voice of their race. For the ordinary Afro-American getting killed every day in Iraq or living in a poor underpriveleged ghetto, things are little better today despite the sacrifice of so many lives in the Civil War.