George Armstrong Custer, one of the most familiar figures of
nineteenth-century American history, is known almost exclusively as
a soldier, his brilliant military career culminating in catastrophe
at Little Bighorn. But Custer, author James E. Mueller suggests,
had the soul of an artist, not of a soldier. Ambitious Honor hones
this radically new perspective, arguing that an artistic passion
for creativity and recognition drove Custer to success and,
ultimately, to the failure that has overshadowed his notable
achievements. Custer's ambition is well known and played itself out
on the battlefield and in his persistent quest for recognition.
What Ambitious Honor provides is the context for understanding how
Custer's theatrical personality took shape and thrived, beginning
with his training at a teaching college before he entered West
Point. Teaching, Mueller notes, requires creativity and
performance, both of which fascinated and served Custer throughout
his life - in his military leadership, his politics, and even his
attention-getting, self-designed uniforms. But Custer's artistic
personality emerges most clearly in his writing career, where he
displayed a talent for what we now call literary journalism.
Ambitious Honor offers a close look at Custer's work as a
best-selling author right up to the time of his death, when he was
writing another book and planning a speaking tour after the 1876
campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne. Custer's fate at Little
Bighorn was so dramatic that it sealed his place in the national
story and obscured, Mueller contends, the more interesting facets
of his true nature. Ambitious Honor shows us Custer anew, as an
artist thrust into the military because of the times in which he
lived. This nuanced portrait, for the first time delineating his
sense of image, whether as creator or consumer, forever alters
Custer's own image in our view.
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