Literature of the Rebellion: A Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets Relating to the Civil War in the United States

Boston: Draper and Halliday, 1866. Quarto/Limited Edition. Hardcover. good. Quarto, 477 pages,One of a limited edition of 60 copies. [There was a Royal Octavio edition of 250 also issued at the same time.) Small stains in margins of several pages, slight foxing, has been rebound. John Russell Bartlett (October 23, 1805 - May 28, 1886) was an American historian and linguist. Bartlett was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on October 23, 1805. In 1819 he was a student at the Lowville Academy in Lowville, New York, which he attended for two years. Bartlett is known in the field of lexicography for his Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), a pioneering work that, although supplanted by later dialect studies, is still of value to students of language and remains a valuable contribution to the subject. Later editions were published in 1859, 1860, and 1877. From 1855 to 1872 Bartlett was Secretary of State of Rhode Island, and while serving in this capacity thoroughly re-arranged and classified the state records and prepared various bibliographies and compilations, relating chiefly to the history of the state. In the later years of his life he became the librarian for the John Carter Brown Library and collated an exhaustive catalog of the collection that was published in four volumes. The American Civil War bibliography comprises books that deal in large part with the American Civil War. There are over 60,000 books on the war, with more appearing each month. Authors James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier stated in 2012, "No event in American history has been so thoroughly studied, not merely by historians, but by tens of thousands of other Americans who have made the war their hobby. Perhaps a hundred thousand books have been published about the Civil War." There is no complete bibliography to the war; the largest guide to books is more than 50 years old and lists over 6,000 of the most valuable titles. Many specialized topics such as Abraham Lincoln, women, and medicine have their own lengthy bibliographies. The books on major campaigns typically contain their own specialized guides to the sources and literature. The most comprehensive guide to the historiography annotates over a thousand major titles, with an emphasis on military topics. The compilation by John Russell Bartlett is notably the earliest, and at the time, most comprehensive catalogue and is notable for its inclusion of pamphlets along with books.