100 Books Like An Irishman in the Iron Brigade

In my opinion, this is one of the best Civil War memoirs ever written.

Rufus Dawes (the great-grandson of William Dawes, who alerted colonial minutemen prior to the Battles of Lexington and Concord, along with Paul Revere and Samuel Prescott) was only 20 years old when he was commissioned a Captain in the 6th Wisconsin Infantry (a regiment in the “Iron Brigade”). He served his three-year term of service and resigned his commission in August 1864; taking part in all of the regiment’s battles up to that point (and some of the bloodiest of the war).

He often led the regiment in battle; taking command at the battle of Antietam when the regiment’s colonel, Edward S. Bragg, was wounded and at Gettysburg, when Bragg was absent. After his resignation, he was brevetted a brigadier general for meritorious service. 

Drawing extensively on his diaries and letters, Dawes published Service in… show more.

This “memoir” was originally serialized in 1902 in the National Tribune, a weekly publication aimed at veterans, under the title “Adventures of an Iron Brigade Man.”

Born in Canada, Robert Beecham’s family moved to Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, when he was about five years old. Beecham served as an enlisted man in the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry regiment (part of the Iron Brigade) and fought in the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, where he was taken prisoner.

After being returned in a prisoner exchange, Beecham was commissioned a 1st Lieutenant in the 23rd United States Colored Troops. With them, he fought at the Battle of the Crater in July 1864, where he was wounded and again taken prisoner. After eight months in a Confederate prison, he escaped, but voluntarily surrendered himself in order to be exchanged (again). He rejoined his regiment and was promoted to captain in May 1865, but resigned… show more.

Herdegen’s fairly new history of the Iron Brigade, published in 2012, rightfully supplants Alan Nolan’s classic history, The Iron Brigade.

Published some 60 years after Nolan’s history and coming in at 656 pages, Herdegen is able to include previously unpublished archival material, letters, photos, journals, and other primary sources. Where Nolan’s history basically stops after the battle of Gettysburg, Herdegen’s book tells the history of the Iron Brigade all the way to Appomattox and beyond; including information about memorial and reunion activity.

Herdegen’s extension of the story of the Iron Brigade into the 1864 Overland campaign through Petersburg and Appomattox provides an important element to its story that has been given short shrift in many of the previous works on the Iron Brigade.

As somebody who tends to use too many quotations in my writing, I appreciate that Herdegen frequently uses quotes. I like hearing the “voice” and reading… show more.

Published in 2025 (hot off the presses), Marten’s book, as he says in his Introduction, is not a regimental history but a regimental “biography.”

As a “biography,” Martin looks at the regiment as a “living organism.” Using a construct that I have often thought about, Martin notes that there were “multiple ‘Sixth Wisconsins.’” As illness, wounds, and transfers took their toll on the initial 1,000 men, another 1,000 joined during the course of the war. This turnover of men; the replacement of veterans by enlistees, substitutes, and draftees, “created an instability,” Martin notes, that must be appreciated in order to fully understand the history of the Sixth.

Using the framework of the “long Civil War,” a long duration view of the Sixth Wisconsin from the creation of the regiment to the death of the last surviving member, Martin explores the history of the regiment “from peace to war and back… show more.

It has been many years since I first read this book yet I still remember how successful the author was in recreating the atmosphere presented by the movie, Gone with the Wind. She was so successful that this book is advertised as a sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s original work. If you want to know how civilian life was in the South during the American Civil War, you won’t be disappointed with this work. And of course, there is the tumultous relationship between Scarlett and Rhett Butler. 

Named one of the “Top 100 Civil War Books” by the Centennial Commission, this records the history of the most famous Union unit of the war. Nolan uses many first-person accounts to ensure accuracy; Service with The Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers being predominant. This book first inspired my interest in studying the Civil War, and sparked my special admiration for Rufus Dawes, eventually leading to the creation of my own book, To My Best Girl – Courage, Honor and Love in the Civil War: The Inspiring Life Stories of Rufus Dawes and Mary Gates.

Thomas’s 2015 novel revolves around Eileen Leary, a tough Irish American nurse yearning to break the middle-class mold in which her life is set when her husband, Ed, a neuroscientist, develops early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Thomas describes his slow deterioration and the ravages inflicted on Eileen and their son, Connell, in drawn-out moments and exquisite detail. In an especially harrowing scene, Eileen stays up all night watching her once brilliant husband struggle with the simple task of tabulating the final grades in his community college class.

Though the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, it is as unsparing an account of Alzheimer’s as I have ever read.

I love primary sources and histories that reproduce them. Here is another amazing feat of historical detection. “Details have been taken from eye-witness accounts; original Certificates of Registration, paintings, and contemporary lithograph drawings have been reproduced,” may sound dry but this book is alive with the voices of immigrants telling both tragic and triumphant tales. Anyone whose Irish ancestors came to North America between 1846 and 1851 will want to examine the numerous passenger lists that Laxton includes. I think of this book and all it taught me when I visit my hometown and stop by the monument commemorating Irish immigrants on the shore of Lake Ontario.

Caldwell opened my eyes not only to aspects of American history I wasn’t familiar with, but current politics with this heavy saga. Captains and the Kings highlighted the plight of Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s and then widened the scope to show the follies of the social classes, political corruption, and greed into the new century. True events and historical figures are woven into this fictional tapestry with such skill that everything seems plausible. I ended the read fearful for our future, like I’d typically get from reading a dystopian novel. It’s an intense read needing tissues, a search engine for looking up historical tidbits you might not be familiar with, and possibly a dictionary. The book haunts me to this day—in a good, though horrific, way.

I grew up with stereotypes about Tammany Hall as a nest of New York political corruption. Golway offers a knowledgeable corrective that shows how the urban machine garnered votes from new immigrant groups and maintained its power by pioneering then-radical social reforms such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation for those maimed on the job, and a minimum wage.

He traces the organization’s decline to changing New York City demographics and a lost ability to respond to the emerging challenges and changes of the post-WWII era—trends that left it vulnerable to a group of college-educated young Democratic Party reformers, both men and women, that Paul O’Dwyer allied with in the late Fifties and Sixties.