Meet our speaker for Saturday, April 13, 2024 - Timothy Smith
We welcome back Timothy B. Smith this month. Tim has spoken to our Round Table on multiple occasions and was the tour guide on our 2012 field trip to Shiloh. Tim is a native of Mississippi and received his BA and MA in History from Ole Miss and his Ph.D. from Mississippi State University, in 2001. He is a veteran of the National Park Service and currently teaches history at the University of Tennessee at Martin. In addition to numerous articles and essays, he is the author, editor, or co-editor of twenty books, including award winners Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg (2004), Shiloh: Conquer or Perish (2014), and The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi (2018). He has recently published books on the May 19 and 22 Vicksburg assaults as well as the Vicksburg siege, and he just finished a new biography of Albert Sidney Johnston. He lives with his wife Kelly and children Mary Kate and Leah Grace in Adamsville, Tennessee.
His main area of interest and specialty, besides the Civil War, is in the history of Civil War battlefield preservation.
Tim has published a history of the first five military parks preserved during the 1890s entitled The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Establishment of America’s First Five Civil War Military Parks. This book came out via the University of Tennessee Press in 2008. Smith has also published an edited version, along with Dr. Gary D. Joiner of Louisiana State University-Shreveport, of a 1966 Ph.D. dissertation on the Battle of Shiloh: Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862.
More about his topic: “The Iron Dice of Battle: Albert Sidney Johnston and the Civil War in the West”
Killed in action at the bloody Battle of Shiloh, Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston stands as the highest-ranking American military officer to die in combat. His unexpected demise had cascading negative consequences for the South’s war effort, as his absence created a void in adequate leadership in the years that followed. In The Iron Dice of Battle, noted Civil War historian Timothy B. Smith reexamines Johnston’s life and death, offering remarkable insights into this often-contradictory figure. As a commander, Johnston frequently faced larger and better-armed Union forces, dramatically shaping his battlefield decisions and convincing him that victory could only be attained by taking strategic risks while fighting. The final wager came while leading his army at Shiloh in April 1862. During a desperate gambit to turn the tide of battle, Johnston charged to the front of the Confederate line to direct his troops and fell mortally wounded after sustaining enemy fire. The first work to survey the general’s career in detail in nearly sixty years, The Iron Dice of Battle builds on recent scholarship to provide a new and incisive assessment of Johnston’s life, his Confederate command, and the effect his death had on the course of the Civil War in the West.