The Civil War
America at War

Many years ago, traveling across the US tracking down some of the Civil War battlefields I stumbled across Ken Burns’ PBS documentary and bought a copy to while away evenings in my motel room. And as astonishing as Burns’ wonderful photography and his enlightening overview of the conflict was - and......more

The first volume of Shelby Foote's three volume narrative about the American Civil War was a very compelling read. It's very dense, and very long because of its completeness, but I found it highly readable and at times quite riveting. In his notes at the end of this volume, Foote mentioned a small b......more

Shelby Foote would be considered by many Civil War readers to be the greatest writer on the subject. He considered himself to be a historian but not an academic, and his extremely detailed knowledge of the Civil War coupled with his straight-forward writing style have produced works which have fasci......more

One of the advantages of growing old (or older) is that you develop a very long memory. 1961 marked the centennial year of the start of the Civil War and the bookstores were filled with works about the war and the people who fought it. I really got into the period and read many of the major works on......more