ABSTRACT
The intense interest in the Great Civil War is clearly shown by the avalanche of books devoted to it over the past forty years. At least a dozen new narratives of the war have been published, as well as detailed studies of most of the major battles and some of the principal commanders; the administrative machinery put in place at local, regional and national level to support and sustain the war effort has been thoroughly investigated insofar as the sources allow, and its effectiveness assessed; and the intellectual preoccupations of the second half of the twentieth century from quantification through women’s rights to postmodernism have opened up new insights into how the war was experienced by those living at the time. Given that the research underpinning this body of work has involved historians in picking through the archives with the finest of toothcombs, it goes without saying that more is now known about almost every aspect of the war than was the case in 1960.
