Gettysburg

From acclaimed Civil War historian Allen Guelzo, a brilliant new history that draws the reader into the muck and grime of Gettysburg alongside the ordinary soldier, and depicts, as never before, the combination of personalities and circumstances that produced one of the great battles of all time.Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military HistoryAn Economist Best Book of the YearA Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the YearThe Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier.Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and thesounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett’s Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story of army life in the Civil War: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny, one of history’s epic battles is given extraordinarily vivid new life.