My specialty is American history, meticulously researched, but delivered in a narrative style that’s akin to fiction. My latest book, A Fierce Glory, is about Antietam, a battle that occupied a single day in 1862, yet remains one of history’s most consequential events. Of course, there are countless military histories of Antietam–or any Civil War battle, for that matter–focusing on troop movements and tactics. I wanted to get at the emotional heart of this epic showdown: the confusion, terror, sadness, along with some startling and selfless acts of heroism. To do so, I drew inspiration from some of my favorite fictional works.
I wrote...
A Fierce Glory: Antietam--The Desperate Battle That Saved Lincoln and Doomed Slavery
This is a character-rich, modern-style account of an 1862 Civil War battle that was more important than Gettysburg and—with a death toll of 3,650 soldiers—remains the bloodiest single day in U.S. history. Had the South won, we’d likely be living in two separate nations today. Because it was a Northern victory instead, though by the slimmest of margins, Lincoln chose to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, imbuing the war effort with a new and noble purpose–freeing the slaves. Lincoln is woven deeply into this tale, far more than in a standard military history of the battle. The rich cast also includes generals George McClellan and Robert E. Lee, medical pioneers Clara Barton and Jonathan Letterman, and Alexander Gardner, the groundbreaking photographer.
As a reader, you spend zero time inside the minds of generals as they pour over maps and hash out strategy. Rather, The Red Badge of Courage focuses on a single character, 18-year-old private, Henry Fleming. And that’s the magic of Crane’s masterpiece. This is war seen from a perspective that is idiosyncratic, intimate, and deeply vulnerable.
Here is Stephen Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, together with four of his most famous short stories. Outstanding in their portrayal of violent emotion and quiet tension, these texts led the way for great American writers such as Ernest Hemingway.
For recent U.S. wars such as Vietnam or Iraq, there’s a considerable body of work both fiction and nonfiction that focuses on the travails of soldiers after the fighting ends. But this is a Civil War-era novel about coming home. It follows a Confederate deserter who leaves a Virginia hospital and sets out for his North Carolina farm. At times heart-breaking, at times uproariously funny, Cold Mountain addresses the weight of war, and the way that survivors are burdened with wounds both physical and psychological.
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.…
As a novel extolling the Confederacy and slavery, this work is problematic, to be sure. Modern readers will have to grapple with whether its merits outweigh its antiquated worldview. In the merits column: Gone with the Wind focuses on the home front and specifically the experiences of women, a topic that gets short shrift in both Civil War fiction and nonfiction. As it happens, only a small percentage of Americans were soldiers. But everyone was affected by the war, and everyone was forced to navigate a world utterly transformed. In this important way, Gone with the Wind explores experiences shared by Union and Confederate civilians alike.
Unlike so many writers, Bierce had actual Civil War experience, as a Union soldier who saw action in a number of key battles. His stories are characterized by a rigorous attention to detail. But Bierce enjoyed serving up verisimilitude with a twist. A strong sense of the macabre, rivaling Poe, is present in some of Bierce’s finest stories such as “Chickamauga,” “One of the Missing,” and “Parker Adderson, Philosopher.” His timeless “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” features one of the most mind-bending twists in all of fiction.
American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce is probably best known for his short stories about the American Civil War. The author's craft for story-telling is exemplified by his famous "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge", which is the story of Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer condemned to die by hanging upon the Owl Creek Bridge. That great short story along with 96 others forms this exhaustive edition of "The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce."
This fifth pick isn’t fiction. But like the best fiction, poetry can pierce through to the very essence. Although shaggy poet Whitman was the furthest thing from a soldier imaginable, he was deeply involved in the war effort nonetheless. After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Whitman traveled to Virginia to find his wounded brother. He then chose to remain in Washington, DC, nursing wounded soldiers. Whitman’s war-time experiences gave rise to some of the finest poems in Leaves of Grass such as “The Wound-Dresser,” “Come Up from the Fields Father,” and “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.”
This Library of America edition is the biggest and best edition of Walt Whitman's writings ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” and a…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
