![]() Are there aspects of any of the individual letters that still stand out for you? I imagine the number is all the greater now. You estimated in a 1994 interview that you had read by that time 25,000 letters written by some 1,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate. If I were writing it today, I would include more social and cultural history and perhaps cut back on the military and political history, but the scholarship to sustain those differences didn't yet exist in the 1980s. In retrospect, I don't think I should have done anything differently. Is there anything that you now feel you should have done differently in Battle Cry? ![]() My book got a tremendous send-off by very positive front-page reviews in The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World, so it hit the ground running. One reason readers were receptive to the book was the growing interest at that time in the Civil War, of which the also unanticipated success of Ken Burns's video documentary two years later is additional evidence. No, I did not anticipate the success of the book. What made readers 25 years ago so receptive to your book? It was indeed a daunting prospect, not so much because of the 50,000 books on the Civil War as because of the prestige of the series and the prominence of other authors in the series.ĭid you anticipate the book’s success? Few if any 900-page books by history professors can compare in sales here and abroad. Vann Woodward and Sheldon Meyer, editors of the Oxford History of the United States series, to do the volume on the Civil War era in 1979. Whose idea was it to write a one-volume history of that war, a war that has led to more books-50,000-plus-than any other American event? That must have been a daunting prospect. Colored Infantry in January 1864, rose to captain in that regiment and a great-great-grandfather, Jesse Beecher, who enlisted in the 112th New York Volunteer Infantry in August 1862, rose to sergeant, died of typhoid fever in April 1865, is buried in the National Military Cemetery at Wilmington, North Carolina. I did have two Civil War ancestors: a great-grandfather, Luther Osborn, who enlisted in the 93rd New York Volunteer Infantry in December 1861, rose to corporal, became a lieutenant in the 22nd U.S. Are you related to any participants in the war? James Birdseye McPherson, who was killed at the Battle of Atlanta in July 1864. To get it out of the way, you are not related to Union Army Gen. To mark the anniversary of Battle Cry’s publication, I reached McPherson at his home in Princeton to ask talk to him the war, the publication of Battle Cry and its aftermath, and the meaning of the Civil War 150 years on: He has previously published a children’s history of the war and books about Lincoln, abolition, why soldiers on both sides fought, Reconstruction, and the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, as well as editing and contributing to scores of other volumes on the war and regularly writing for The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861–1865, his 20th, appeared last year. Now retired after a long career as a history professor at Princeton, McPherson continues to publish about the Civil War. Lee and Abraham Lincoln to common soldiers writing loved ones on the eve of battle, and the myriad interpretations of an outcome that still seems not fully resolved today-appears destined to last as long as the United States remains a country. That fascination-with the Civil War’s causes and violence, its great players from Robert E. The ongoing sesquicentennial celebration has only redoubled that flood of new material and public fascination with the war. Since then, America has devoured a seemingly endless stream of new histories, film, and documentaries about the war. The book was the blasting clap that set off the explosion of popular interest in the war that then greeted Ken Burns’s epoch-making PBS documentary The Civil War when it was released two years later. ![]() ![]() McPherson miraculously manages between to recount the origins of the war and its progress in virtually every theater of fighting through its entire four years, explain the political maelstrom that engulfed both the North and South, touch on heartbreaking stories of individual warriors, follow the machinations of government officials, and describe the military, cultural, and social consequences of the greatest cataclysm in American history, all while carrying the reader along within a brisk and vivid narrative. The book’s popularity is not hard to explain. ![]()
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