This book is a real disappointment, barely even a curate's egg. The product of a regular symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression held at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga since 1993, it contains thirty essays on the role of journalists and journalism in the coming, course and aftermath of the American Civil War.

The essays cover a wide range of topics; the majority of them are southern in focus. Illustrative examples include the Unionist journalism of editor Andrew Jackson Donelson, the changing stance of North Carolina newspapers during the secession crisis, the work of the Confederate Press Association, the memorializing of rebel general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the close relationship between the southern press and Klan-style violence during Reconstruction. So far, so good. These are all important and potentially interesting subjects. Unhappily the majority of these pieces should never have seen the light of day. Over two-thirds of them are written by scholars working in communications and journalism studies. Their efforts are, in the main, exceedingly lame. They lack adequate contextualization, are seldom grounded in manuscript research, and fail either to engage convincingly with the latest scholarship on the Civil War or to ask hard questions about the relationship between journalism and historical change.

The worst of them are little more than pastiches of extensive quotations which would shame many an undergraduate historian. One seven-page account of the anti-slavery journalist James Redpath contains twelve such quotes which constitute the primary building blocks of a woefully mundane account of Redpath's antebellum activities. Most of the other contributions to this volume are similarly light on analysis and intellectual ambition, with many of the contributors seemingly content to reinvent the wheel rather than push back the boundaries of our knowledge of the American press during the Civil War era. There are a handful of honourable exceptions but even some of these, notably Menahem Blondheim's study of the Lincoln administration's attempts to manage war information, have already been published elsewhere in slightly different form.

At times the quality of the editing matches the quality of the scholarship. Roy Morris, for example, has southern journalists striving “mightily” twice on the same page (5), while material from the New York Tribune and the Richmond Enquirer is unwittingly fused on page 91 so that Horace Greeley's anti-slavery Tribune abruptly and ridiculously becomes a mouthpiece for anti-abolitionist sentiment. In fairness to the editors, they were probably daunted by the size of the task before them. They note judiciously that for every paper chosen for inclusion in this, the second of a three-book series, three ‘were set aside for future consideration’ (x). The mind fairly boggles at the thought of the bloated monstrosity that might have been unleashed upon libraries across the world without the cuts made by Morris and his hard-pressed colleagues.

None of this is to say that nineteenth-century journalism is not a fit subject for academic scholarship. As the better essays in this collection make clear, the press contributed hugely to the sectional crisis of the 1850s, to the bolstering of popular morale in the ensuing Civil War, and to the violence of Reconstruction and the subsequent reunification of the divided republic. There are many important questions that need answering – about the extent to which the largely partisan press was a tool for power-hungry elites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line; about the ways differing ideologies were disseminated by newspapers; about how, and how effectively, governments tried to manage information during the Civil War itself; and about the ways in which ordinary people received news and editorial comment during what many scholars have seen as a transitional era in the history of the American press (surprisingly not one of the contributors to this volume displays an interest in reader-response theory). The history of Civil War-era journalism should also deepen our understanding of “linkage” – of how politicians and voters related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century – and strengthen our awareness of how grassroots reform movements altered society and institutions.

Unfortunately this lacklustre collection sheds only a few shafts of light on any of these issues. Far from being a shining example of what scholars can achieve when they collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, it merely highlights the dangers of dabbling in areas beyond one's own professional craft. As noted above, a third volume of essays generated by the University of Tennessee symposia is pending. On this evidence historians of the Middle Period should look forward to its appearance more in hope than in expectation.