The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000 dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property.
Written by a leading authority on our nation\'s most searing crisis, Fateful Lightning offers a vivid and original account of an event whose echoes continue with Americans to this day..
He examines the strategy, the tactics, and especially the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South.
Guelzo also puts the conflict in a global perspective, underscoring Americans\' acute sense of the vulnerability of their republic in a world of monarchies.
And unlike other surveys of the Civil War era, it extends the reader\'s vista to include the postwar Reconstruction period and discusses the modern-day legacy of the Civil War in American literature and popular culture.
Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology.
In Fateful Lightning , two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C.
Above all, it permanently ended the practice of slavery and proved, in an age of resurgent monarchies, that a liberal democracy could survive the most frightful of challenges.
The war also sparked some of the most heroic moments in American History and enshrined a galaxy of American heroes.
The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000 dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property
