Authors David Powell and Frank Varney will be conducting a program, “General William S. Rosecrans at Chickamauga.” The program includes talks in the morning, a battlefield walk in the afternoon, and book signings. The event is from 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 4 at the Chickamauga Chattanooga National Military Park, 3370 Lafayette Road, Fort Oglethorpe. For more information, visit http://www.nps.gov/chch/index.htm.
Review of David Powell and his award-winning book, The Chickamauga Campaign-Glory or the Grave:
David Powell’s The Chickamauga Campaign—Glory or the Grave: The Breakthrough, Union Collapse, and the Retreat to Chattanooga, September 20-23, 1863 is the second volume in his magnificent projected three-volume study of this overlooked and largely misunderstood campaign and was recently announced as the recipient of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table’s 2016 Richard Barksdale Harwell Book Award. Powell’s magnum opus, complete with original maps, photos, and illustrations, is the culmination of many years of research and study,
coupled with a complete understanding of the battlefield’s complex terrain system.
For any student of the Civil War in general, or the Western Theater in particular, Powell’s trilogy is a must-read.
David A. Powell is a 1983 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute with a B.A. in history. After
graduating from VMI, he went to work for CBS Messenger—a family business in the Chicago area—but never lost his intense interest in military history, especially in the American Civil War. David has written numerous articles for a variety of magazines, more than fifteen historical simulations of various battles, and regularly leads tours of the Chickamauga battlefield. His previous books include The Maps of Chickamauga: An Atlas of the Chickamauga Campaign, Including the Tullahoma Operations, June 22 -Sep. 23, 1863 (2009), and Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joseph Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign (2010), the recipient of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table’s Richard B. Harwell Award.
Review of Frank Varney and his book, General Grant and the Rewriting of History:
In 1885, a former president of the United States published one of the most influential books ever written about the Civil War. An entire generation of Americans had eagerly awaited his memoirs and it has remained so popular that it has never gone out of print. Historians then and now have made extensive use of Grant’s recollections, which have shaped how we understand and evaluate not only the Union army’s triumphs and failures, but many of the war’s key participants.
The Memoirs of Ulysses Simpson Grant may be a superbly written book, Frank P. Varney persuasively argues, but is so riddled with flaws as to be unreliable.
General Grant and the Rewriting of History aptly demonstrates that blindly accepting historical “truths” without vigorous challenge is a perilous path to understanding real history.
Frank P. Varney earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He regularly leads student groups to Civil War battlefields and makes frequent speaking appearances before Civil War Roundtables and historical societies. Professor Varney is currently developing a course to be taught on-site at Gettysburg, and will do the same for a course on Chickamauga. He teaches U.S. and classical history at Dickinson State University of North Dakota, where he is also the director of the Theodore Roosevelt Honors Leadership Program. This is his first book.