When the Confederates emerged as victors in the Chickamauga Campaign, the Union Army of the Cumberland lay under siege in Chattanooga, with Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee on nearby high ground at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. A win at Chattanooga was essential for the Confederates, both to capitalize on the victory at Chickamauga and to keep control of the gateway to the lower South. Should the Federal troops wrest control of that linchpin, they would cement their control of eastern Tennessee and gain access to the Deep South. In the fall 1863 Chattanooga Campaign, the new head of the western Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant, sought to break the Confederate siege. His success created the opportunity for the Union to start a campaign to capture Atlanta the following spring.

Woodworth’s introduction sets the stage for ten insightful essays that provide new analysis of this crucial campaign. From the Battle of Wauhatchie to the Battle of Chattanooga, the contributors’  well-researched and vividly written assessments of both Union and Confederate actions offer a balanced discussion of the complex nature of the campaign and its aftermath. Other essays give fascinating  examinations of the reactions to the campaign in northern newspapers and by Confederate soldiers from west of the Mississippi River.

Complete with maps and photos, The Chattanooga Campaign contains a wealth of detailed information about the military, social, and political aspects of the campaign and contributes significantly to our  understanding of the Civil War’s western theater.

Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition

Few American Civil War operations matched the controversy, intensity, and bloodshed of Confederate general John Bell Hood’s ill-fated 1864 campaign against Union forces in Tennessee. In the first-ever anthology on the subject, The Tennessee Campaign of 1864, edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, fourteen prominent historians and emerging scholars examine the three-month operation, covering the battles of Allatoona, Spring Hill, and Franklin, as well as the decimation of Hood’s army at Nashville.

Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville.

Canvassing both military and social history, this well-researched volume offers new, illuminating perspectives while furthering long-running debates on more familiar topics. These in-depth essays provide an expert appraisal of one of the most brutal and notorious campaigns in Civil War history.

The audience is an integral part of performance and is in fact what separates a rehearsal from a performance. The relationship, however, between performers and the audience has evolved over time, which is one of the subjects addressed, along with the changing disposition of the audience itself and a number of other topics, in Gods and Groundlings, volume 20 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium. The essays in this volume discuss spectatorship in historical context, the role of the audience in the digital age, the early modern English
transvestite theatre, Annie Oakley and the disruption of Victorian audiences, and historical attempts to create ideal audiences. Edited by E. Bert Wallace, this latest publication from the largest regional theatre organization in the United States collects the most current scholarship on theatre history and theory.