Has anyone read Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson? What did you think? Is really the best single volume re-telling of the Civil War?
I think it is, yes. Of course, even a nut like me has read only so many one volume histories of the Civil War for comparison.
I own a copy, & it is very, very good.
Our local Battlfield & Cemetary has a bookstore dedicated to Civil War History, & the Park Rangers all describe it as the best one volume history of the War.
I have had only two exposures to encapsulated histories of the Civil War:
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Battle Cry of Freedom, which transported me so thoroughly to that time and place I haven’t even needed to re-read it in nearly twenty years, any more than you need to re-read a memory of a personal experience.
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Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”, which I turned off about 3/4 of the way through the first installment. When I was a kid in Boston in the late 1970s, there was a kid’s history show on weekend mornings, early as hell, where a cartoon character called “Grandpa Grizzly” told a coon-skin-hatted youth about historical events. The cartoon segments were merely bookends for narrated sections told over panning still of woodcuts, lithographs, and drawings of the period. Ken Burns’ multi-ep documentary was so reminiscent of that style, I would have assumed he had had something to do with the cartoon if not for the fact that the cartoon was done with about ten times the quality of Burns’ work.
So I think you know where I stand, at least.