The American Civil War by John Keegan
This magisterial history of the first modern war is on the scale of John Keegan's classics, A History of Warfare and The First World War. In his sweeping, unputdownable narrative he highlights the geography, leadership and strategic logic at the heart of the conflict. John Keegan writes: 'The geography of the battlefield is to me a living reality. I know the appearance of the battlefields, I know the distances between them, I know the cemeteries in which the dead were buried. What constantly puzzles me, however, is to relate the landmarks of the war to its events, chronology, strategy and logic. That war went on for so long - four years - over such an enormous space - the Confederacy covered an area as large as Europe west of Russia - and involved so many battles - 260 is the common reckoning - and so many people that its events conform to no pattern at all. 'How to make sense of the war is the question. In recent years, this became the primary concern of historians, after nearly a century of writing concerned either with arguing the rights or wrongs or simply re-telling the story chronologically. 'The story of America is, in one of its dimensions, that of man and wilderness. The story can be told as one in which man tames and dominates; it can equally be told as one in which nature is never really subdued, always bides its time, often asserts its power to remind men of their pygmy status. The Civil War is certainly a story of the struggle of man against man; it is equally a story of the struggle of man against geography, in which those who had a feel for the country eventually succeeded because they knew how to work with the landscape instead of ignoring or defying it.'
John Keegan is the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Britain's foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998, he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle, Six Armies in Normandy, Battle at Sea, The Second World War, A History of Warfare (awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), Warpaths, The Battle for History, The First World War, and most recently, Intelligence in War. For many years John Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and he has been a Fellow of Princeton University and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received the OBE in the Gulf War honours list, and was knighted in the Millennium honours list in 1999. John Keegan died in August 2012.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780091794835 |
| ISBN 10 | 0091794838 |
| Title | The American Civil War |
| Author | John Keegan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cornerstone |
| Year published | 2009-09-17 |
| Number of pages | 416 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |