ECW Honors Hartwig’s I Dread the Thought of the Place with 2024 Book Award

Emerging Civil War has selected D. Scott Hartwig’s I Dread the Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and the End of the Maryland Campaign as the recipient of this year’s Emerging Civil War Book Award. I Dread the Thought of the Place was published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

In making its Book Award selection, the committee also chose an honorable mention: Elizabeth R. Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster).

The Emerging Civil War Book Award recognizes a work of Civil War history with a public history focus published in the preceding calendar year. Recipients are chosen by ECW’s stable of published authors, making the award a peer-to-peer honor given by Civil War writers to Civil War writers.

“In I Dread the Thought of the Place, D. Scott Hartwig provides the most in depth and masterful study of the battle of Antietam and its immediate aftermath held in a single volume,” the Book Award Committee said in making its selection. “Gathering hosts of unpublished accounts while remaining aware of the most recent historiography about the 1862 Maryland campaign, Hartwig crafted the analysis of I Dread the Thought of the Place for decades.”

The committee lauded the scope of Hartwig’s work in the book. “Hartwig highlights major strategic and operations factors of the battle, as well as the soldiers’ view. Beyond the battle itself, he deconstructs why the armies remained in position the day afterwards, how the Army of Northern Virginia withdrew, and how the campaign ultimately concluded,” the committee said.

Hartwig was the supervisory park historian at the Gettysburg National Military Park for twenty years. The committee noted that his battlefield experience was evident in the text of his book. “Using decades of experience as a park ranger who has traversed the battlefield countless times, Hartwig demonstrates a masterful and encyclopedic knowledge of geography, helping readers step into the shoes of soldiers both on the march and in combat,” it said. “Hartwig also examines critical decisions at all levels, from army commanders shifting reserves, to colonels deploying regiments, to skirmishers seeking concealment.”

Historian Doug Crenshaw, in his original review of the book published on the Emerging Civil War blog, said, “It is difficult to imagine that this volume, combined with the author’s previous book, To Antietam Creek, will ever be supplanted as the definitive studies on the 1862 Maryland Campaign.”

In addition to I Dread the Thought of the Place, Hartwig is author of the companion book To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), The Battle of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign of 1862: A Bibliography (Greenwood, 1990), and three books related to the battle of Gettysburg.

The Book Award Committee also lauded this year’s honorable mention, Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate Who Defied the South.

“Varon’s Longstreet is not primarily focused on its subject’s time in the Confederate army. Instead, it shines by exploring James Longstreet’s postwar activity connected with the Republican Party as a politician, speaker, and militia leader,” the committee said. “The book unpacks how Longstreet became a target by postwar Lost Cause Southerners, and how that targeting still impacts Longstreet’s reputation. Varon’s biography continues ongoing looks over the last decades that reexamine Civil War generals, like his friend Ulysses Grant, whose reputations were tarnished after the fact. Thanks to Varon’s biography of Longstreet, more people are taking interest in Civil War leaders, the historic sites associated with them, and how their whole lives impacted our nation’s history.”

Historian Andrew Lang, in his original review of the book published on the Emerging Civil War blog, said, that after the Civil War, “Longstreet was the raw proof that change could have happened. He practiced the kind of ‘self-reinvention’ that Union victory and emancipation necessitated (291).… Longstreet was hardly a progressive and never perfect. His own complexity underscored the complexity of his era. And Varon’s triumphant book provides the vindication that he always sought.”

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Previous winners of the Emerging Civil War Book Award include Gettysburg’s Southern Front: Opportunities and Failures at Richmond by Hampton Newsome; Meade at Gettysburg: A Study in Command by Kent Masterson Brown; The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson; The Fight for the Old North State: The Civil War in North Carolina, January-May 1864 by Hampton Newsome; A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg by A. Wilson Greene; On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4-15, 1864 by Gordon Rhea; and Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson by Timothy B. Smith.

About Emerging Civil War

Emerging Civil War is the collaborative effort of more than thirty historians committed to sharing the story of the Civil War in an accessible way to the general public. Founded in 2011 by Chris Mackowski, Jake Struhelka, and Kristopher D. White, Emerging Civil War features public and academic historians of diverse backgrounds and interests, while also providing a platform for emerging voices in the field. Initiatives include the award-winning Emerging Civil War Series of books published by Savas Beatie, LLC; an annual symposium; a speakers’ bureau; and a daily blog: www.emergingcivilwar.com.

Emerging Civil War is recognized by the I.R.S. as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation.