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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence
Glenn Beck, the New York Times bestselling author of The Great
Reset, revisits Thomas Paine's Common Sense. In any era, great
Americans inspire us to reach our full potential. They know with
conviction what they believe within themselves. They understand
that all actions have consequences. And they find commonsense
solutions to the nation's problems. One such American, Thomas
Paine, was an ordinary man who changed the course of history by
penning Common Sense, the concise 1776 masterpiece in which,
through extraordinarily straightforward and indisputable arguments,
he encouraged his fellow citizens to take control of America's
future-and, ultimately, her freedom. Nearly two and a half
centuries later, those very freedoms once again hang in the
balance. And now, Glenn Beck revisits Paine's powerful treatise
with one purpose: to galvanize Americans to see past government's
easy solutions, two-party monopoly, and illogical methods and take
back our great country.
The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford
Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped
by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the
attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of
the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in
a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was
Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills
argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the
fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its
defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control
of his troops.
A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial
figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort
Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with
blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a
convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war.
After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of
the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth
about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends,
popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.
Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of
other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II
and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by
the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the
embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly.
Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a
massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a
congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to
discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as
pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter
with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a
heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.
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