The 11 best books on the Civil War

Malcolm Jones writes about books, music, and photography for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is the author of a memoir, Little Boy Blues, and collaborated with the songwriter and composer Van Dyke Parks and the illustrator Barry Moser on Jump!, a retelling of Brer Rabbit stories.

For The Daily Beast, he named the eleven best books on the Civil War, including:

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Civil War remade many attitudes but none so much as the thinking on death. Carnage and slaughter on a grand scale ground down prevailing notions of the good death and undercut belief in divine providence. Many new ways of thinking about death came out of the war, but none more sweeping than the new expectations of the military—its responsibility to identify, preserve, and honor the dead. This is one of those groundbreaking histories that clarifies a crucial piece of the past previously ignored.

Read about another book on the list.

Also see: Ten best novels about the American Civil War.

--Marshal Zeringue