Mailbag Report

I am doing my best to aid publishers by subscribing to a plethora of magazines and journals as well as print versions of two newspapers. Recently, I received copies of North & South and Civil War History and was pleased that both featured articles with trans-Mississippi themes. So, here is the run down:

Civil War History (September 2012)—Matthew M. Stith, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Tyler, has written ‘The Deplorable Condition of the Country’: Nature, Society, and War on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Guest editor Megan Kate Nelson writes that the article “examines the dynamic roles that the natural environment played in Trans-Mississippi border warfare. Perhaps no other locale brought so many interesting communities into contact with one another: Union regulars, Confederate irregulars, unionist and Confederate civilians, and unionist and Confederate Native Americans. Ultimately, Stith asks, to what extent did the war on the border evolve into a conflict over nature?”

North & South (Volume 14, #4)—Two articles written for a general audience relate to the trans-Mississippi. They are Colonel Canby Saves New Mexico by Ray Shortridge and Fighting the Sioux by Michael A. Eggleston.