Ralph Bowden

October 17, 2011 In his 1882 memoir, Company Aytch, Sam R. Watkins, a private in the Army of Tennessee, explained what it was like at a whole series of Civil War battles—Shiloh, Stones River, Missionary Ridge, Atlanta, Jonesboro, Franklin, and Nashville, among many others—doing his duty as the musket balls and artillery shells whizzed by him. Now this classic is being rereleased by Turner Publishing in Nashville with an introduction by Franklin historical novelist Robert Hicks. This edition, revised according to Watkins’s notes from the 1890s, includes many corrections and additions and should be considered the definitive text of the book.

April 27, 2011 During the 1980s and ‘90s, Chattanooga author Erin Tocknell grew up with engaged, responsible parents in an interesting old house in a safe neighborhood in Nashville, where she could afford to be an independent, restless tomboy. She was active in a big-steeple Methodist church and went to magnet schools downtown; in many ways her life seemed idyllic. Only as an adult did she come to recognize the complex social and racial history of the environment she had passed through as a child. Tocknell’s new essay collection, Confederate Streets , recounts this awakening.

January 5, 2011 When Bobby Hoppe pulled the trigger, was it a premeditated act of murder or a split-second reaction in self defense? In 1957, nobody knew but Bobby Hoppe himself, and nobody else really wanted to know: Bobby was a Chattanooga football hero. In 1988, new evidence and an aggressive new investigator reopened the cold case. A Matter of Conscience is Sherry Lee Hoppe’s memoir about her husband’s long-hidden anguish—and about the trauma of exposure.

August 31, 2010 In Reconstructing Appalachia: the Civil War’s Aftermath, editor Andrew L. Slap pulls together scholarly essays that expand understanding of the mountain South, especially in relation to the turbulent years of Reconstruction.

July 16, 2010 Most of the scientific information predicting global warming that Gwynne Dyer outlines in his new book, Climate Wars, has been in the news for years. Many people have ignored it, however, and even those who are both informed and concerned may not have thought through the logical consequences of what scientists predict: famine and war—and human extinction. Dyer will discuss Climate Wars at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville on July 20 at 7 p.m.

June 15, 2010 Recruits from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois went off to fight in 1861 to put down a rebellion promoted by radical secessionists. Few of these soldiers thought of abolition as an issue. As the war continued and intensified after 1863, however, their own practical experiences with freed slaves, led them to reconsider. In The Good Men Who Won the War, Robert Hunt traces the infinite variations in how the veterans came to think of the Civil War.