Kenneth W. Noe

Kenneth Noe sitting on the Maine shore. — Land’s End, Bailey Island, Maine

About

A native of Virginia, Ken Noe is a graduate of Emory & Henry College, earned masters degrees at Virginia Tech and the University of Kentucky, and received his doctorate from the University of Illinois in 1990. He taught at the University of West Georgia for a decade and then at Auburn University from 2000 until 2021. He is the author or editor of eight books, most recently The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate and the American Civil War, a Lincoln Prize finalist in 2021 and co-winner of the 2022 Colonel Richard W. Ulbrich Memorial Book Award. Twice a Pulitzer Prize entrant, he also received the 2002 Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War history for Perryville, the 1997 Tennessee History Book Award for A Southern Boy in Blue, and several teaching awards. He is currently researching the myths and realities of Abraham Lincoln’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief. When not thinking about the Civil War, he is hiking or following Liverpool FC, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and every school he ever attended.

Contact him for book reviews or speaking engagements at noekenn@auburn.edu.

Curriculum vitae

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Praise for The Howling Storm

“The Howling Storm‘s greatest feature is the way it implores its twenty-first century readers to commiserate with the suffering soldiers and hamstrung officers who knew, more viscerally than most modern Americans, that they were largely at the mercy of the natural environment,”–Journal of the Civil War Era

“The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War is…an invaluable resource for students of the American Civil War. Never again should a battle, campaign, or event be studied without Kenneth Noe’s offering close at hand.”–Emerging Civil War

“Utilizing everything from Smithsonian Institution records to soldiers’ letters, Noe reconstructs daily high/low temperatures and precipitation levels for nearly every major battle and campaign, details the lived experience of that weather, and elaborates on the ways it helped determine victory or defeat…..Noe’s exhaustive account drives home his point that understanding the experience of Civil War combat means understanding the ecological contexts in which it occurred. . . . The Howling Storm is a great reminder that the winds of war are often more than a metaphor.””–Journal of Southern History

“The Howling Storm is a magnum opus that successfully challenges historians to rethink all they have ever known of the war.”–Civil War Monitor

“The Howling Storm is…a necessary volume for Civil War collections.”–Choice

Co-winner of the 2020 Colonel Richard W. Ulbrich Memorial Book Award. “Noe both demonstrates the varied effects of weather and climate on specific campaigns and battles, and synthesizes their impact on the military possibilities and trajectory of the war. Only a remarkable research effort could achieve these comprehensive goals, and The Howling Storm shows the mastery of sources and events Noe has developed across a long and fruitful career. Indeed, few scholars would have attempted so ambitious a project, or with such range and acuity.”

A Top Ten Book of 2021, Civil War Books and Authors