Michael Egan's flying gray-haired yank is a published account of his wartime experiences, including his service as an officer in the 15th West Virginia Volunteer Infantry Regiment and his capture, his escape, his recapture and eventual second escape. His story details evasion from Confederate patrols and help from slaves and Unionists.

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. The beautiful landscape as well as the significant role of the coal mining industry are both detailed in the WPA Guide to West Virginia. The essay “Country Folk and Country Ways” gives the reader an idea of how rural life was in the Mountain State in the early 20th century and the descriptions of Charleston, Clarksburg, and other cities are complete with stunning photographs of classic Southern architecture.

Among the most pervasive of stereotypes imposed upon southern highlanders is that they were white, opposed slavery, and supported the Union before and during the Civil War, but the historical record suggests far different realities. John C. Inscoe has spent much of his scholarly career exploring the social, economic and political significance of slavery and slaveholding in the mountain South and the complex nature of the region’s wartime loyalties, and the brutal guerrilla warfare and home front traumas that stemmed from those divisions. The essays here embrace both facts and fictions related to those issues, often conveyed through intimate vignettes that focus on individuals, families, and communities, keeping the human dimension at the forefront of his insights and analysis. Drawing on the memories, memoirs, and other testimony of slaves and free blacks, slaveholders and abolitionists, guerrilla warriors, invading armies, and the highland civilians they encountered, Inscoe considers this multiplicity of perspectives and what is revealed about highlanders’ dual and overlapping identities as both a part of, and distinct from, the South as a whole. He devotes attention to how the truths derived from these contemporary voices were exploited, distorted, reshaped, reinforced, or ignored by later generations of novelists, journalists, filmmakers, dramatists, and even historians with differing agendas over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His cast of characters includes John Henry, Frederick Law Olmsted and John Brown, Andrew Johnson and Zebulon Vance, and those who later interpreted their stories—John Fox and John Ehle, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier, Emma Bell Miles and Harry Caudill, Carter Woodson and W. J. Cash, Horace Kephart and John C. Campbell, even William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Their work and that of many others have contributed much to either our understanding—or misunderstanding—of nineteenth century Appalachia and its place in the American imagination.

John Daniel Imboden carved out one of the most unique and fascinating careers of the Civil War. In 1859, the lawyer and politician was commissioned a captain in the Staunton (Va.) Artillery. When war broke out in 1861, he served with his battery at Harpers Ferry and First Manassas. In 1862, Imboden raised the 1st Virginia Partisan Rangers and fought in Stonewall Jackson's famed Shenandoah Valley Campaign. A promotion to brigadier general followed in early 1863, as did daring cavalry raids. Imboden served until the end of the war, but it was his service during the Gettysburg Campaign for which he is best remembered. Steve French's Imboden's Brigade in the Gettysburg Campaign, the winner of the 2008 Bachelder-Coddington Award, the Gettysburg Civil War Round Table Book Award, and the Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal, is the first full-length book to tell the story of the general's "finest hour." The brigadier and his 1400-man Northwestern Virginia brigade, which included artillery, infantry and cavalry, spent most of the early days of the campaign raiding along the B&O Railroad in western Virginia, before guarding ammunition and supply trains in the rear of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the three-day (July 1-3, 1863) Battle of Gettysburg. The sharp Confederate defeat forced a hasty retreat , and Lee put Imboden in charge of escorting the wagons filled with thousands of wounded safely back to Virginia. After a harrowing journey beset by heavy rain and attacks by roving bands of Union cavalry, Imboden's seventeen-mile-long "wagon train of misery" finally reached Williamsport, Maryland, where the flooding Potomac River trapped them. On July 5-6, Imboden established a strong defensive position on a ridge outside of town and cobbled together a force of soldiers that included his own brigade, various Confederate units on their way to join the army, 600 teamsters, many walking wounded and over twenty cannons. Demonstrating sound judgment and outstanding bravery, this hastily organized force beat back attacks by two Union cavalry divisions in the "Wagoners Fight." Imboden's efforts saved the wagon train and thousands of men who would otherwise have been captured or killed. General Lee praised Imboden and reported that he "gallantly repulsed" the enemy troopers. French's Imboden's Brigade in the Gettysburg Campaign is based on scores of archival sources, newspaper accounts, and an excellent understanding of the terrain. The dozens of maps, photos, and illustrations, coupled with French's smooth prose, tells in riveting detail the full story of the often forgotten but absolutely critical role Imboden and his men played during the final fateful days of the Gettysburg Campaign.

The story of Captain John Valley Young personifies the body of rugged Union Army volunteers from West Virginia during the Civil War: highly resilient, stubbornly independent, and fiercely patriotic. Using Captain Young’s wartime letters to his wife, Paulina Franklin Young, and his daughters, Sarah and Emily Young, along with his diary and numerous other original soldier accounts, this book reveals the experiences of a Union soldier and his family who were truly willing to “Sacrifice All for the Union.” Young, a farmer and Methodist-Episcopalian minister prior to the Civil War, during April 1861 raised a company of Union volunteers at the strongly pro-Southern village of Coalsmouth, Virginia, (modern St. Albans, West Virginia). He was adamantly opposed to slavery, yet often expressed a bitter ire at having to fight a violent civil war because his beloved nation had thus far failed to eradicate the awful practice. While he displayed an unshakeable desire to preserve the Union, Young’s convictions were severely tested as he and his family faced constant dangers from guerillas and Confederate raids in the Kanawha Valley. Captain Young also participated in more than one hundred skirmishes and eleven major engagements in the bloody Shenandoah Valley, and at Petersburg, and Appomattox; more than any other Union officer from West Virginia. He died from tuberculosis in 1867, a sad irony after surviving some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. “…Stand firm to the good old Cause. I have just come from Charleston, and found while there that there will be a change of Commanders in the Department of [West] Virginia. The authorities feel determined that we shall have protection. But if we cannot have better protection than we have had, the country is ruined. But I assure you there will be a change for the better. I don’t know how you will get up to see me now. Well, we must bear it the best we can. Sacrifice All for the Union.” - Captain John Valley Young, Letter to his wife, February 3, 1862