Reviews for Social welfare and economic policy

The average rating for Social welfare and economic policy based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-15 00:00:00 Nicolas Huguelet Sword sets out to chart the rise and fall of Confederate optimism, but his rambling and unfocused work is unsatisfying. If you are going to write an entire book about trends in popular opinion, you are going to want some sort of statistical methodology, but Sword doesn't have one. Instead, he snips extracts from contemporary letters and journals and, based on this apparently arbitrary selection of evidence, makes pronouncements about rising or declining morale. I'd probably be willing to go along with Sword's claims if he actually took the time to develop and justify them; instead the book is heavily padded with moderately interesting accounts of military campaigns, with primary focus on the war in the West and the Gettysburg campaign. To some extent this is necessary to supply background for the shifts in morale within the army, but I felt Sword went on at such length because he was more comfortable rehashing military history than exploring his primary subject. There are signs of sloppiness which might easily mislead the unwary reader, as when Sword repeatedly confuses the drive for secession with the drive for war, or discusses the hotheaded Southern press without considering the Northern editorializing to which it was a response. The only reason to read this book is for the snippets of primary source material which Sword quotes, and much of that can readily be found elsewhere. If you actually want to know about Confederate morale, you will learn more from Paul D. Escott's brief entry in the Encyclopedia of the Confederacy.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-08 00:00:00 Randy Everett tedious but a good book for you if you've read 100 civil war books already