Books by Brian Steel Wills

This work reconstructs life for soldiers from the region on the battlefield and for civilians in the homes of southeastern Virginia, providing a depiction of what life was like for the ordinary person - black, white, soldier, or Unionist - contending with the hardships of the Civil War.

From Birth of a Nation to Cold Mountain, Hollywood has used the Civil War to create compelling cinema with each generation resolving the tug of war between entertainment value and historical accuracy differently. Wills looks at the portrayal of the war in film, explores their accuracy, how the films influenced each other, and how they reflect America's changing understandings of the conflict and of the nation.