CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

 

Introduction

PART I. FRAMING THE WAR

Linking America’s Two Most Important Wars

Antebellum

History and Historical Memory

Out West

One War or Two?: The United States Versus Confederates and Indians, 1861–1865

Unconventional Warfare

The Dark Turn—Late Nineteenth-Century Style

Reckoning with Confederate Desertion

The Grand Review

Revisiting the Gettysburg Address

Environmental Shocks

PART II. GENERALS AND BATTLES

Tracking U. S. Grant’s Reputation

The Supreme Partnership

R. E. Lee as a General

Robert E. Lee’s Multiple Loyalties

A One-Sided Friendship

Attrition in Lee’s High Command

Little Mac

How Lee’s “Old War-Horse” Gained a New Following

Stonewall Jackson and the Confederate People

Stonewall and Old Jube in the Valley

Sheridan Makes His Name in the Valley

Poor George Gordon Meade

Reynolds and Sedgwick

Toward Santa Fe and Beyond: Confederates in New Mexico

Gettysburg in Perspective

PART III. CONTROVERSIES

Let the Chips Fall Where They Will

Two Ways to Approach One War

The Union in Memory

The Union Army and Emancipation

Union Veterans Claimed They Fought for a Higher Cause

The War Was Won in the East

The Desperate Gamble

The War’s Overlooked Turning Points

Did the Fall of Vicksburg Really Matter?

What If?

Did the War End in 1865?

Occupation and the Union Military Effort

PART IV. HISTORIANS AND BOOKS

Lessons from David M. Potter

Two Gifted Writers

“The Plain Folk’s Pioneer” Reframed History

Recovering Allan Nevins

Acknowledging Ella Lonn

Shelby Foote, Popular Historian

Gettysburg’s Great Historian

British Writers View the Confederacy

Biographers and Generals

A Tactical History Masterpiece

Off the Tracks

The “Other” Confederate Army

Deciding What to Read

PART V. TESTIMONY FROM PARTICIPANTS

Seeing the War through Soldiers’ Letters

Father Neptune’s War

Abner Doubleday’s Revenge

Congressional Oversight with a Punch

Voices from the Army of the Potomac

Harvard Men at War

John B. Jones’s War

Right-Hand Men

Confederate Women View the War

Wartime Chronicle

A Window into Confederate Memory

An Indispensable Confederate and His Diary

Every Sketch Tells a Story

PART VI. PLACES AND PUBLIC CULTURE

Go to Gettysburg!

Battlefields as Teaching Tools

Fluid Landscapes

Reevaluating Virginia’s “Shared History”

The Power of Photographs

Glory: Reflections on a Civil War Classic

Hollywood’s Twenty-First-Century Lincoln

 

Appendix: Roster of Essays

Notes

Index