New Release-Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864

Another new release from Rowman & Littlefield.


The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 (The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era)

“Cutting through 150 years of myths and misinformation surrounding Price’s Raid, Kyle Sinisi provides a compelling study of breadth and depth, demonstrating why the Trans-Mississippi was the most interesting theater of the Civil War. A judicious, balanced, and nuanced account of perhaps the least studied and most misunderstood major campaign of the war.”

—William Garrett Piston, co-author of Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It

 

The Last Hurrah is the story of Price’s invasion from its politically charged planning to its starving retreat. The Last Hurrah is also the story of what happened after the shooting stopped. Even as hundreds of Missourians followed Price out of the state and tried desperately to join his army, elements of the Union army visited retribution upon Confederate sympathizers while still others showed little regard for the lives of the prisoners they had captured. Many more would have to suffer and die long after Sterling Price had fled Missouri.

 

Features:

• Re-assesses long-standing interpretations of all major battles and many of the skirmishes, focusing on command decision making.
• Utilizes the latest scholarship regarding Civil War weaponry and marksmanship to assess the tactical effectiveness of both Union and Confederate forces.
• Uses 20 newly created maps to demonstrate, in many cases, 150 years of poor cartography and its influence upon how historians have viewed the campaign and its battles.

 

Kyle S. Sinisi is professor of history at The Citadel. He is author of Sacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism, 1861-1880 and co-editor of Warm Ashes: Essays in Southern History at the Dawn of the 21^st Century.

New Release--A History of Heists: Bank Robbery in America

This came through my email recently and it grabbed my attention. As I start expanding my reading interests further this looks like one I will have to consider.




A History of Heists: Bank Robbery in America

No crime is as synonymous with America as bank robbery. Though the number of bank robberies nationwide has declined, bank robbery continues to captivate the public and jeopardize the safety of banks and their employees.

 

Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, and Patty Hearst are among the most famous figures in the history of crime in the United States. Jesse James used his training as a Confederate guerrilla to make bank robbery a political act. John Dillinger capitalized on the public’s scorn of banks during the Great Depression and became America’s first Public Enemy Number One. When she held up a bank with the leftist Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst fueled the country’s social unrest. Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella delve into the backgrounds and motivations of the robbers, and explore how they are as complex as the nation whose banks they have plundered.

 

But as much as the story of bank robbery in America focuses on the thieves, it is also a story of those who investigate the heists. As bank robbers became more sophisticated, so did the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies.

 

Features:

 

Ø  Provides a social history of the United States, with bank robbery as the subject. It is much more than the encyclopedia of crime

Ø  Discusses bank robbery’s cultural impact, including its portrayal in the movies

Ø  Examines why bank robbery is declining

Jerry Clark retired as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2011 after twenty-seven years in law enforcement, including careers as a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he is also director of risk analysis and mitigation at McManis & Monsalve Associates.

 

Ed Palattella joined the Erie Times-News, in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1990. He has won a number of awards, including for his investigative work and his coverage of crime.