This is a very interesting anthology for those who care about American Civil War history. It’s a collection of letters, newspaper columns and journal entries from people of all sorts who took part in the war or witnessed it the war from the Union side. (Harwell also published a companion collection, The Confederate Reader.)

We get journal entries from Union soldiers in far flung theaters of war like New Mexico, but we are also taken inside Fort Sumter at the very beginning of the war, a diary entry of a woman watching the soldiers of both sides rush back and forth through the streets of her hometown, Gettysburg, first-hand accounts of major engagements like the Battle of Shiloh, letters and telegrams back and forth from an increasingly exasperated Lincoln to his generals during the early years of the conflict. There are accounts of life inside prisoner of war camps and a description of life in New Orleans during the Federal occupation.

Editor Richard B. Harwell (1915-1988) was a prominent enough Civil War historian (especially regarding the Confederacy) that the Atlanta Civil War Round Table now confers the Harwell Book Award for the best book on a Civil War subject published in the preceding year: http://www.civilwarroundtableofatlanta.org/Harwell-Bio.htm

The Union Reader was published in 1958. My copy is a first edition hardback. ( )