Lesley Gordon and Andrew Huebner, eds., Race and Gender at War: Writing American Military History (University of Alabama Press, 2024)

Reviews

"In the book’s most ambitious and insightful piece, Caroline Wood Newhall traces the Confederacy’s evolving policy toward African American prisoners of war (POWs). Just as Black soldiers constituted a deadly challenge to the white supremacist assumptions underlying the Confederacy, those same assumptions led to paralyzing ambiguities in Confederate policy toward Black POWs. Treating such men as legitimate soldiers would undercut the racial basis of slavery, but executing them would also imply that they were more than mere property. The outlines of the story are well known, but Newhall’s discussion of legal theory and specific cases is enlightening." Gerald Prokopowicz, East Carolina University