Combining video and audio from Ken Burns’s beloved film with animated maps and hundreds of images—rare photographs as well as paintings, lithographs, and maps in full color—this deluxe eBook brings the Civil War to life in a new way. The acclaimed, best-selling companion volume to the celebrated PBS series—the highest-rated series in the history of public television—has now been enhanced to create one of the richest eBook experiences available today. This new edition includes: • Nearly an hour of video and audio from the original film. We get wonderful footage re-creating what life was like during the war, Shelby Foote’s peerless storytelling and analysis, and informed commentary from other prominent historians. • Completely new and original animated maps of the three days at Gettysburg that make it easier than ever to follow this legendary and complicated battle. • Hundreds of illustrations carefully placed to maximize the reading experience without impeding the narrative flow of the text. As we mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, this deluxe eBook allows us to better understand and appreciate the greatest challenge our nation has ever faced.
This book includes critical essays on Burns's documentary series about the Civil War. The essayists discuss Burns's work, the ways in which television shows history, and the Civil War itself.--adapted from back cover.
Based on the celebrated PBS television series about the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood—the complete text of the magisterial illustrated work of history that The New York Times hailed as "a treasure for the eye and mind." "The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things.... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads: the suffering, the enormous tragedy of the whole thing." —Shelby Foote, from The Civil War Now Geoffrey Ward's magisterial work of history is available in a text-only edition that interweaves the author's narrative with the voices of the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood: not just Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Robert E. Lee, but genteel Southern ladies and escaped slaves, cavalry officers and common foot soldiers who fought in Yankee blue and Rebel gray. The Civil War also includes essays by our most distinguished historians of the era: Don E. Fehrenbacher, on the war's origins; Barbara J. Fields, on the freeing of the slaves; Shelby Foote, on the war's soldiers and commanders; James M. McPherson, on the political dimensions of the struggle; and C. Vann Woodward, assessing the America that emerged from the war's ashes.
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the Modern Library publishes Shelby Foote’s three-volume masterpiece in a new boxed set including three hardcovers and a new trade paperback,American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic Civil War: A Narrative,edited by and with an introduction from Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham and including essays by Michael Beschloss, Ken Burns, Annette Gordon-Reed, and others. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf commissioned southern novelist Shelby Foote to write a short, one-volume history of the American Civil War. Thirty years and a million and a half words later—every word having been written out longhand with nib pens dipped into ink—Foote published the third and final volume of what has become the classic narrative of that epic war. As he approached the end of the final volume, Foote recounted this scene in a letter to his friend, the novelist Walker Percy: “I killed Lincoln last week—Saturday, at noon. While I was doing it (he had his chest arched up, holding his last breath to let it out) some halfassed doctor came to the door with vols I and II under his arm, wanting me to autograph them for his son for Xmas. I was in such a state of shock, I not only let him in; I even signed the goddam books, a thing I seldom do. Then I turned back and killed him and had Stanton say, ‘Now he belongs to the ages.’ A strange feeling, though. I have another 70-odd pages to go, and I have a fear they’ll be like Hamlet with Hamlet left out. Christ, what a man. It’s been a great thing getting to know him as he was, rather than as he has come to be—a sort of TV image of himself, with a ghost alongside.” When Percy read the final book, he wrote to Foote: “It’s a noble work. I’m still staggered by the size of the achievement. . . . It isThe Iliad.” A selection of these letters, along with essays by Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, Ken Burns, Annette Gordon-Reed, Michael Eric Dyson, Julia Reed, Robert Loomis, Donald Graham, John M. McCardell, Jr., and Jay Tolson, are included inAmerican Homer,the bonus paperback book available only in the Modern Library boxed set ofThe Civil War. Shelby Foote’s tremendous, sweeping narrative of the most fascinating conflict in our history—a war that lasted four long, bitter years, an experience more profound and meaningful than any other the American people have ever lived through—begins with Jefferson Davis’s resignation from the United States Senate and Abraham Lincoln’s departure from Springfield for the national capital. It is these two leaders, whose lives continually touch on the great chain of events throughout the story, who are only the first of scores of exciting personalities that in effect makeThe Civil Wara multiple biography set against the crisis of an age. Four years later, Lincoln’s second inaugural sets the seal, invoking “charity for all” on the Eve of Five Forks and the Grant-Lee race for Appomattox. Here is the dust and stench of war, a sort of Twilight of the Gods. The epilogue is Lincoln in his grave, and Davis in his postwar existence—“Lucifer in Starlight.” So ends a unique achievement—already recognized as one of the finest histories ever fashioned by an American—a narrative that re-creates on a vast and brilliant canvas the events and personalities of an American epic: the Civil War.
The most-watched program in PBS history, Ken Burns' history of the Civil War is the first full-scale presentation of the conflict that tore the country apart and redefined the nation. Five years in the making, this 5-volume DVD collection presents the entire sweep of the war. This collection travels from the battle-fields to the home fronts, from the generals to the enlisted men and from the opening guns at Sumter to the stillness at Appomattox and beyond.
A nine part documentary series, presented here as a 4 DVD set, which examines the American Civil War, through photographs, readings from documents and diaries.
This first volume of Shelby Foote's classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis’s farewell to the United Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America’s great war becomes clear. Exhaustively researched and masterfully written, Foote’s epic account of the Civil War unfolds like a classic novel. Includes maps throughout. "Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives…a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters."—Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News "A stunning book full of color, life, character and a new atmosphere of the Civil War, and at the same time a narrative of unflagging power. Eloquent proof that an historian should be a writer above all else." —Burke Davis "To read this great narrative is to love the nation—to love it through the living knowledge of its mortal division. Whitman, who ultimately knew and loved the bravery and frailty of the soldiers, observed that the real Civil War would never be written and perhaps should not be. For me, Shelby Foote has written it.... This work was done to last forever." —James M. Cox, Southern Review
This book provides the first attempt to synthesise what is a pervasive phenomenon, and one that is mentioned tangentially in many political analyses, but nowhere receives the systematic and theoretical treatment that its significance to the working of 'democratic' political practice deserves. It will thus be a volume that should interest a range of scholars in government and political theory, in comparative politics and communications.
