9780195313666. New condition. Hard cover. Language: English. Pages: 272. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 272 p. In the same tradition as Lincoln and the Second American Revolution and Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War, Pulitzer-prize winner James M. McPherson has gathered an illuminating collection of essays that reflect his latest thinking on the Civil War. Filled with new interpretations and fresh scholarship, these essays address many of the most enduring questions and provocative debates about the Civil War. In some, McPherson distills the wisdom of many years of teaching and writing about the meaning of the war and about slavery and its abolition. In others, he makes use of primary research that breaks new ground on such topics as Confederate military strategy, foreign views of the war, soldiers and the press, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and Southern efforts to shape a heroic memory of the war. The selection will include several never-before-published essays, including one on General Robert E. Lee's goals in the Gettysburg campaign, and another on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. The book also features a typescript of McPherson's 2000 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture about Lincoln's legacy that has never been published in its complete form. As a whole, these essays provide a rich interpretive history of the Civil War and its meaning for America - indeed for the world.
The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestsellers Crossroads of Freedom and Tried by War, among many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America's preeminent Civil War historian. In this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPherson offers fresh insight into many of the enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation's history.
McPherson sheds light on topics large and small, from the average soldier's avid love of newspapers to the postwar creation of the mystique of a Lost Cause in the South. Readers will find insightful pieces on such intriguing figures as Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jesse James, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and on such vital issues as Confederate military strategy, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and the realities and myths of the Confederacy. This Mighty Scourge includes several never-before-published essays--pieces on General Robert E. Lee's goals in the Gettysburg campaign, on Lincoln and Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. All of the essays have been updated and revised to give the volume greater thematic coherence and continuity, so that it can be read in sequence as an interpretive history of the war and its meaning for America and the world.
Combining the finest scholarship with luminous prose, and packed with new information and fresh ideas, this book brings together the most recent thinking by the nation's leading authority on the Civil War.
