The Penguin Book of the American Civil War

The American Civil War has already taken on the quality of a legend, and not only for Americans. Feats of endurance, acts of chivalry, and strokes of strategic genius; towering personalities like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E Lee; human and constitutional issues of vast significance - all these have provided themes of endless personal, political and military fascination. But this was a war. Moreover this last and most violent rupture of the unity of the USA was the first war to be adequately recorded by the camera. Though no historian is more fully qualified than Bruce Catton to describe the conflict in all its aspects, the gripping story he tells in this volume gains extraordinary force and authenticity from the mass of war photographs reproduced along with contemporary sketches, paintings and posters...