Description: The first book to chronicle the degree to which noncombat deaths impacted the men and women who offered their services and gave their lives in the factories and fields of the Union and the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865.
Brief description: Brian Steel Wills is professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of the Civil War Era at Kennesaw State University. His many books include George Henry Thomas: As True as Steel and The Confederacy's Greatest Cavalryman: Bedford Forrest, both from Kansas.
Review Quotes:
"With this work, a master historian presents a powerfully researched and engagingly written history of the American Civil War's non-combat fatalities. Brian Steel Wills explores the end of life events for those men and women who died by tragic accident, military execution, virulent disease, melancholy suicide, unpredictable weather, and industrial mishap. Filling a wide gap in the Civil War field, this book is an important one to have on any military history bookshelf."--Barton A. Myers, Associate Professor of Civil War History, Washington and Lee University, and editor of The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War
"Award-winning historian Brian Steel Wills has written another fine work, this time describing in riveting detail the many Americans who fell ingloriously away from battlefields. The research is impressive and the writing moving."--Jeffry D. Wert, author of A Glorious Army: Robert E. Lee's Triumph, 1862-1863
Battle accounted for only a third of soldier-deaths in the Civil War. Wills has pored through a mass of primary material to bring to light a host of other killers who preyed daily on soldiers blue and gray. This is a major contribution to the human element so often overlooked in Civil war history.--James I. Robertson, editor of A Rebel War Clerk's Diary
"We know a great deal about soldier deaths from disease and combat in the Civil War, but Brian Steel Wills shows us that thousands more died from other causes ranging from accidents and drownings to lightning and snakebites. Verily, as one soldier put it, "there is no glory [in war]. Everything about it is simply horrible." In this original and exhaustive study, Wills has provided countless examples of the horror of inadvertent death."--James M. McPherson, author of The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters
Brian Wills' Inglorious Passages explores the whole range of noncombat deaths in the American Civil War--an important and virtually untouched subject. This fascinating and often poignant study is filled with wonderfully drawn accounts of soldiers and civilians alike whose stories illuminate the war's enormous death toll in new and important ways. Even veteran students of the Civil War will learn a great deal from this fine book."--George C. Rable, author of Damn Yankees! Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South