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Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia: Survival in a Civil War Regiment. By Scott Walker. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. xx, 311 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8203-2605-4.)
Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia deserved to be published, but not by an academic press because the author failed to engage a single scholarly debate about the common Civil War soldier. Soldier motivation, desertion, the psychological trauma of combat, and Confederate nationalism are issues discussed, but they are not interpreted in a broader historiographical framework. The story line focuses almost exclusively on the day-to-day activities of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Infantry, leaving the reader unsure how the experiences of this regiment reflect broader patterns of thought and action in the Confederate army.
In many ways, Hell's Broke Loose in Georgia follows the formula of the first scholarly regimental histories published in the 1960s. The scholarly pioneers who wrote those...