If one is to believe contemporary historians, the South never had a chance. Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long. In The Confederate War he reexamines the Confederate experience through t...

The United States saw long-simmering sectional tensions erupt into fighting at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861.This began what would become the most cataclysmic military struggle in the western world between Waterloo and the First World War. This volume focuses on events in the Virginia theater during the conflict's first two years, highlighting Union and Confederate strengths and weaknesses, leadership and strategy on each side, and the ways in which ev...

Even one hundred and fifty years later, we are haunted by the Civil War—by its division, its bloodshed, and perhaps, above all, by its origins. Today, many believe that the war was fought over slavery. This answer satisfies our contemporary sense of justice, but as Gary Gallagher shows in this brilliant revisionist history, it is an anachronistic judgment.In a searing analysis of the Civil War North as revealed in contemporary letters, diaries, and documents, Gallagher demonstrates...

Full DescriptionIn The American War: A History of the Civil War Era, renowned historians Gary W. Gallagher and Joan Waugh provide a fresh examination of the Civil War, the great defining moment in U.S. history, as well as its aftermath and enduring memory, in a masterful work that prize-winning historian William C. Davis calls "easily the best one-volume assessment of the Civil War to date." By investigating this crucial period of U.S. history through the ...

In this collection, Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher examines Robert E. Lee, his principal subordinates, the treatment they have received in the literature on Confederate military history, and the continuing influence of Lost Cause arguments in the late-twentieth-century United States. Historical images of Lee and his lieutenants were shaped to a remarkable degree by the reminiscences and other writings of ex-Confederates who formulated what became known as the Lost Cause interpretati...

Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was drastically inflated by early biographers and Lost Cause apologists? These divergent characterizations represent the poles between which scholarly and popular opinion on Lee has swung over time. Now, in eight essays, Gary Gallagher offers ...

This edition from Osprey Publishing presents the full story of the American Civil War.The four long years of Civil War saw fighting across America on an unprecedented scale, incurring losses to both sides to an extent never previously imagined. As the battles raged from east to west, from the First Battle of Bull run to Sherman's march to the Sea, no part of America remained untouched by the war, with families finding themselves torn and fighting on opposing sides....

A "well-reasoned and timely" ( Booklist) essay collection interrogates the Lost Cause myth in Civil War historiography.Was the Confederacy doomed from the start in its struggle against the superior might of the Union? Did its forces fight heroically against all odds for the cause of states' rights? In reality, these suggestions are an elaborate and intentional effort on the part of Southerners to rationalize the secession and the war itself. Unfortunately,...

Shirley Rose Gray’s memoir and diary chronicle her World War II experiences with a USO show in the Pacific Theater during the summer of 1945. Part of comedic film actor Eddie Bracken’s troupe of entertainers, the twenty-two-year-old native of Los Angeles performed on bitterly contested islands such as Guam, Peleliu, Tinian, and Saipan, as well as aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga and other naval vessels. Her narrative recounts traveling on crowded planes, performing in w...

In Becoming Confederates, Gary W. Gallagher explores loyalty in the era of the Civil War, focusing on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early—three prominent officers in the Army of Northern Virginia who became ardent Confederate nationalists. Loyalty was tested and proved in many ways leading up to and during the war. Looking at levels of allegiance to their native state, to the slaveholding South, to the United States, and to the Confederacy, Gallagher shows ho...

The Maryland campaign of September 1862 ranks among the most important military operations of the American Civil War. Crucial political, diplomatic, and military issues were at stake as Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan maneuvered and fought in the western part of the state. The climactic clash came on September 17 at the battle of Antietam, where more than 23,000 men fell in the single bloodiest day of the war.Approaching topics related to Lee’s and McClellan’s operations from...

In the seventy-three succinct essays gathered in The Enduring Civil War, celebrated historian Gary W. Gallagher highlights the complexity and richness of the war, from its origins to its memory, as topics for study, contemplation, and dispute. He places contemporary understanding of the Civil War, both academic and general, in conversation with testimony from those in the Union and the Confederacy who experienced and described it, investigating how mid-nineteenth-century perceptio...