No written work embodies the tension between art and history more fully than Shelby Foote’s mammoth three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. Few people realize Foote was a novelist before he became the “warm and folksy raconteur” of anecdotal Civil War history...

Read on, Macduff, at Emerging Civil War.

In my last post, I began to discuss Michael Shaara’s aesthetic choices for constructing The Killer Angels as he did, and how he adopted a Lost Cause-interpretation of Robert E. Lee as a central choice for his novel ( Read more... )

One of my favorite places to work at FSNMP is the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, the small plantation office building where the Confederate general died. It’s a story I love so much that I wrote a book about it, The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson. But no book gives the story the kind of adoring treatment that Jeff Shaara’s Gods and Generals gives it. ( Read more... )

"I stand with you against the dark forces of revisionist history and denial of facts."

-- Evil Twin

"With malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right..."

-- Lincoln

As the horn section carries Max Steiner’s score from its overture into the sweeping, now-iconic strings of its main theme, Gone With the Wind opens with haggard-looking slaves returning from a hard day’s work set against the first of many sunset backdrops. On-screen text immediately evokes a romanticized antebellum past:

Read on, Macduff, at ( Read more... )

“We may say that only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born,” wrote Robert Penn Warren during the Civil War’s centennial; “or to state matters another way, in the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.” Writer/activist Albion W. Tourgee, however, considered that moment in a different light ( Read more... )

One of my favorite memories of Jackson comes from when he was three or four. We were visiting the FDR Memorial in D.C. one evening, and at the very end of the memorial is a wall that lists FDR's famous "Four Freedoms": Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want ( Read more... )

As a battlefield guide at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park (FSNMP), I frequently speak with folks who’ve come to the battlefields because they’ve readThe Killer Angels, which in turn inspired them to come see a Civil War battlefield. Michael Shaara’s novel is about the battle of Gettysburg and has nothing to do with any of the ( Read more... )

"The Lord God said: 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him ( Read more... )