Clayton E. Jewett

Being a nonlinear examination of scholarly issues in Texas history during the 1860's. As such, it reads almost like a collection of contributed papers. His scholarship is probably acceptable, but the book is almost completely devoid of interest for the general reader, or even for the civil war aficionado, come to that. The most laughably pedantic chapter concerns cloth distribution in the state, but there are others almost as risible. In addition, the author defies the style manual in several annoying ways, such as putting 'peculiar institution' in quotation marks each time he uses it (and he uses it a lot) and identifying everybody ion the book by their full name each and every time they appear, whether it's the first or the forty-seventh. There are not a great number of misspellings and homonym errors, but too many for what one would expect from a university press.… (mehr)