James McPherson Set To Release New Edited Collection In January

I was browsing the History News Network and noticed that James McPherson is set to release a new edited collection in January titled, This Mighty Scourge of War: The American Illiad, 1861-1865.  Like his other collections, this one is published by Oxford University Press.  Here is a description from their website:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestseller Crossroads of Freedom , among many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America’s preeminent Civil War historian. Now, in this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPherson offers fresh insight into many of the most enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation’s history.  McPherson sheds light on topics large and small, from the average soldier’s avid love of newspapers to the postwar creation of the mystique of a Lost Cause in the South. Readers will find insightful pieces on such intriguing figures as Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jesse James, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and on such vital issues such as Confederate military strategy, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and the realities and myths of the Confederacy. This Mighty Scourge includes several never-before-published essays–pieces on General Robert E. Lee’s goals in the Gettysburg campaign, on Lincoln and Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. In that capacity, Lincoln invented the concept of presidential war powers that are again at the center of controversy today. All of the essays have been updated and revised to give the volume greater thematic coherence and continuity, so that it can be read in sequence as an interpretive history of the war and its meaning for America and the world. Combining the finest scholarship with luminous prose, and packed with new information and fresh ideas, this book brings together the most recent thinking by the nation’s leading authority on the Civil War. It will be must reading for everyone interested in the war and American history.

Perhaps we can all chip in and buy a copy for Dimitri.  Hey Dimitri it looks like McPherson has been upgraded from “dean of Civil War historians” to “master historian of the Civil War in our time” by Gabor Boritt. It must be a conspiracy.

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3 comments… add one
  • Richard Dec 22, 2006 @ 20:47

    Looks like Dimitri has slapped the ball back into your court in his recent post “James McPherson, children’s author.”
    Let me just say that on my own behalf that it has been the works of people like McPherson, Burns, and, dare I say it, Sharra that has lead me to a more serious study of the ACW. Since Dimitri does not allow posting on his blog I hope you do not mind me raising my simple counter to his staunch opposition to narrative history. The ability to understand history, which is in fact lived stories of our very lives, from a narrative concept is very central to academic pursuit of meaning (that which the facts alone can never tell us). Narrative has the ability to raise the emotive aspects of individual experience to the level of knowledge and learning that a strictly analytical approach has failed to do.

  • Tom Dec 4, 2006 @ 9:26

    I’ll pass.

  • Richard Dec 3, 2006 @ 21:47

    One more book to add to the list of “can’t wait for it.”
    Also, kudos on the Dimitri slant. This is one point on which I am on the other side of Hggerstown Road.

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