To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 D. Scott Hartwig Johns Hopkins University Press 2012, $49.95

For nearly three decades, Stephen W. Sears' Land­­scape Turned Red has been the gold standard among books about the September 1862 Maryland …

Hood's Texas Brigade in the Civil War Edward B. Williams McFarland & Co. 2012, $45

The last men in the ragged gray line to emerge from the chilly morning mists and stack arms one final time were from Texas. They …

War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 by James M. McPherson University of North Carolina Press, 2012, $36

James M. McPherson, perhaps the greatest historian of the Civil War, continues to find aspects of the conflict that …

Born to Battle: Grant and Forrest: Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga by Jack Hurst

The Global Lincoln by Richard Carwardine, Jay Sexton, eds. Oxford University Press 2011, $29.95

At the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009, a new area of Lincoln studies emerged: his legacy outside the United States after the Civil War …

From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, by Randall Fuller (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, by Davis S. Reynolds (Norton, 2010)

REVIEWED BY NAN …

New releases look at Hannibal, Britain in the Middle East, and the rise and fall of airpower.

War in Pictures: Beautifully illustrated books for the folks on your list

James Donovan's Blood of Heroes is among the most thorough existing one-volume histories of the Alamo, making it an excellent starting point for aficionados of all things Texas.

Spells out the medical consequences of war, from the Civil War to today's fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, where more veterans are surviving but with more serious wounds

Michael Lemish’s book, Forever Forward: K-9 Operations in Vietnam, offers an examination of the some 4,000 dogs that served in Vietnam, frequently engaging the enemy and credited with averting an estimated 10,000 American casualties

Scholar Jeremy Black takes on Orlando Figes's new history of the Crimean War.

Stephen Budiansky reviews the book The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, by Victor Davis Hanson

MHQ reviews McGregor Knox's,To The Threshold of Power, which explores the origins and dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships in 1922 and 1933.

Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson, edited by J. Gregory Acken, 1998, Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 717-796-0411, 500 pages, $34.95.

Reviews of Civil War soldiers' letter collections rarely grace the pages …