A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation
Author: John Matteson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393247082

Download A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America. December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.


A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation
Language: en
Pages: 528
Authors: John Matteson
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-02-09 - Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

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Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America. December 1862 drove the
Chancellorsville's Forgotten Front
Language: en
Pages: 330
Authors: Chris Mackowski
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-05-01 - Publisher: Grub Street Publishers

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The first book-length study of two overlooked engagements that helped turned the tide of a pivotal Civil War battle. By May of 1863, the stone wall at the base
Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!
Language: en
Pages: 688
Authors: George C. Rable
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009-11-15 - Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

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During the battle of Gettysburg, as Union troops along Cemetery Ridge rebuffed Pickett's Charge, they were heard to shout, "Give them Fredericksburg!" Their cri
Washington Roebling's Civil War
Language: en
Pages: 461
Authors: Diane Monroe Smith
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-07-01 - Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

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Washington Roebling is well known as the man who supervised construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. His path to overseeing that monumental task began during the Ci
The Gettysburg Address
Language: en
Pages: 304
Authors: Sean Conant
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-04-24 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

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It is the most famous speech Lincoln ever gave, and one of the most important orations in the history of the nation. Delivered on November 19, 1863, among the f