Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
The 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 the sounds 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.