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Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861-1865. By Sean Michael O'Brien. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999. ISBN 0-275-96430-2. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. Pp. ix, 221. $35.00.
During the last decade, numerous historians have radically revised our view of the Civil War by analyzing the vicious guerrilla warfare which ravaged vast reaches of the contested border areas between North and South. The flags and bugles of the grand and famous battles now appear to have been temporal and spatial exceptions to the rule of relatively small scale and inconclusive guerrilla firefights, which included looting, burning out and often killing of civilians, shooting and sometimes mutilation of captured enemies. Most of the studies of this mode of warfare have been...