Myths of the Civil War: The Fact, Fiction, and Science behind the Civil War?s Most-Told Stories

In the spirit of Robert Adair’s cult classic The Physics of Baseball, here is a book that tackles the long-cherished myths of Civil War history—and ultimately shatters them, based on physics and mathematics. At what range was a Civil War sniper lethal? Did bullets ever “rain like hail”? Could one ever step across a battlefield by stepping only on bodies and never hard ground? How effective were Civil War muskets and rifles? How accurate are photographs and paintings?

In this genre-bending work of history, Scott Hippensteel puts the tropes of Civil War history under the microscope and says, “Wait a minute!” Combining science and history, Hippensteel reexamines much that we hold dear about the Civil War and convincingly argues that memoirs and histories have gotten it wrong.

This is a work of history and science for our era of “fake news”—and for well beyond. Readers will never look at the Civil War the same way again.

Scott Hippensteel is an Associate Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he focuses on coastal geology, geoarchaeology, and environmental micropaleontology. His early research involved the H. L. Hunley, the famous Confederate submarine, and used microfossils to interpret that great historical artifact. His previous work includes Rocks and Rifles (Springer, 2018), a look at how geology influenced the Civil War. A native of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, Hippensteel holds graduate degrees from the University of Delaware. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.