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 perceptions align with, or deviate from,
current ideas regarding the origins, conduct, and aftermath of the
war. The tension between history and memory forms a theme
throughout the essays, underscoring how later perceptions about the
war often took precedence over historical reality in the minds of
many Americans. The array of topics Gallagher addresses is
striking. He examines notable books and authors, both Union and
Confederate, military and civilian, famous and lesser known. He
discusses historians who, though their names have receded with
time, produced works that remain pertinent in terms of analysis or
information. He comments on conventional interpretations of events
and personalities, challenging, among other things, commonly held
notions about Gettysburg and Vicksburg as decisive turning points,
Ulysses S. Grant as a general who profligately wasted Union
manpower, the Gettysburg Address as a watershed that turned the war
from a fight for Union into one for Union and emancipation, and
Robert E. Lee as an old-fashioned general ill-suited to waging a
modern mid-nineteenth-century war. Gallagher interrogates recent
scholarly trends on the evolving nature of Civil War studies,
addressing crucial questions about chronology, history, memory, and
the new revisionist literature. The format of this provocative and
timely collection lends itself to sampling, and readers might start
in any of the subject groupings and go where their interests take
them.
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