Press Release--The Battle of Pea Ridge

Received this press release last week from my good friends at The History Press.

The History Press is pleased to introduce the new title:

The Battle of Pea Ridge

The Civil War Fight for the Ozarks

James R. Knight

A­fter months of reverses, the Union army went on the offensive in the early spring of 1862. In Virginia, General McClellan prepared for his Peninsula Campaign; in Tennessee, General Grant had captured Forts Henry and Donelson; and in southwestern Missouri, General Samuel R. Curtis had driven Sterling Price and his Missouri State Guard out of the state and into the arms of General Ben McCulloch’s Confederate army in northwestern Arkansas. Using the united armies of Price and McCulloch, the new Confederate department commander, Earl Van Dorn, struck back at Curtis’s Federal army, outnumbered and two hundred miles from its supply base. Two days of fighting in the wilds of the Ozark Mountains at a place called Pea Ridge decided control of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri for the rest of the war.

James R. Knight is a graduate of Harding University, class of 1967. He spent five years as a pilot in the United States Air Force flying the C-130E and thirty-one years as a pilot for Federal Express, the last twenty years as a McDonnell Douglass DC-10 captain. In the early ’90s, he began researching a historical incident in his hometown and published his first work, an article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. In 2003, Eakin Press published his biography of Bonnie and Clyde titled Bonnie and Clyde: A Twenty-first-Century Update. In 2007, he published the story and correspondence of a Confederate cavalryman titled Letters to Anna. This is his third work in the Civil War Sesquicentennial Series, having written The Battle of Franklin in 2009 and The Battle of Fort Donelson in 2011. Knight retired from Federal Express in 2004 and lives in Franklin, Tennessee, where he works part time as a historical interpreter for the Battle of Franklin Trust. When not encouraging visitors at the Carter House to relive some moments of the Battle of Franklin, he collects historical documents and artifacts and occasionally drives his restored 1934 Ford V-8. He and his wife, Judy, have three children and six grandchildren.

ISBN: 978-1-60949-447-6 • Paperback • 160 pages • $19.99 • February 2012

This new book is available at local stores & online at Historypress.net

It retails as an E-BOOK via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s I-bookstore, Google’s E-bookstore, & Overdrive.