The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory PDF full book. Access full book title The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory by Adam Petty. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Adam Petty
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807172146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this highly revisionist study, historian Adam H. Petty tracks how veterans and historians of the Civil War created and perpetuated myths about the Wilderness, a forest in Virginia that served as the backdrop for three of the war’s most interesting campaigns. This forest had a fearsome reputation among soldiers, especially those from Union armies; many believed it to be an exceptional landscape with a menacing mystique that created favorable combat conditions for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. According to Petty, the mythology surrounding the campaigns in the Wilderness began to take shape during the war but truly blossomed in the postwar years, continuing into the present. Those myths, he suggests, confounded accurate understandings of how the physical environment influenced combat and military operations. While the Wilderness did create difficult combat conditions, Petty refutes claims that it was unique and favored the Confederates. Unlike previous studies of the Wilderness, this work does not focus on a single battle or campaign. Instead, Petty explores all the major clashes there—Chancellorsville, Mine Run, and the battle of the Wilderness—which allows Petty to observe changes over time, especially regarding the attitudes and actions of generals and soldiers. Yet Petty’s study is not a narrative history of the campaigns. Instead, he reconsiders traditional interpretations surrounding the nature of the Wilderness and how it affected military operations and combat. His work analyzes not only the interaction between military campaigns and environment but also how the memory of that interaction evolved into the myth we know today.
Author: Adam Petty
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807172146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this highly revisionist study, historian Adam H. Petty tracks how veterans and historians of the Civil War created and perpetuated myths about the Wilderness, a forest in Virginia that served as the backdrop for three of the war’s most interesting campaigns. This forest had a fearsome reputation among soldiers, especially those from Union armies; many believed it to be an exceptional landscape with a menacing mystique that created favorable combat conditions for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. According to Petty, the mythology surrounding the campaigns in the Wilderness began to take shape during the war but truly blossomed in the postwar years, continuing into the present. Those myths, he suggests, confounded accurate understandings of how the physical environment influenced combat and military operations. While the Wilderness did create difficult combat conditions, Petty refutes claims that it was unique and favored the Confederates. Unlike previous studies of the Wilderness, this work does not focus on a single battle or campaign. Instead, Petty explores all the major clashes there—Chancellorsville, Mine Run, and the battle of the Wilderness—which allows Petty to observe changes over time, especially regarding the attitudes and actions of generals and soldiers. Yet Petty’s study is not a narrative history of the campaigns. Instead, he reconsiders traditional interpretations surrounding the nature of the Wilderness and how it affected military operations and combat. His work analyzes not only the interaction between military campaigns and environment but also how the memory of that interaction evolved into the myth we know today.
Author: Stephen Cushman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920412
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
On 5 and 6 May 1864, the Union and Confederate armies met near an unfinished railroad in central Virginia, with Lee outmanned and outgunned, hoping to force Grant to fight in the woods. The name of the battle--Wilderness--suggests the horror of combat at close quarters and an inability to see the whole field of engagement, even from a distance. Indeed, the battle is remembered for its brutality and ultimate futility for Lee: even with 26,000 casualties on both sides, the Wilderness only briefly stemmed Grant's advance. Stephen Cushman lives fifty miles south of this battlefield. A poet and professor of American literature, he wrote Bloody Promenade to confront the fractured legacy of a battle that haunts him through its very proximity to his everyday life. Cushman's personal narrative is not another history of the battle. "If this book is a history of anything," he writes, "it's the history of verbal and visual images of a single, particularly awful moment in the American Civil War." Reflecting on that moment can begin in the present, with the latest film or reenactment, but it leads Cushman back to materials from the past. Writing in an informal, first-person style, he traces his own fascination with the conflict to a single book, a pictorial history he read as a boy. His abiding interest and poetic sensibility yield a fresh perspective on the war's continuing grip on Americans--how it pervades our lives through films and songs; novels such as The Red Badge of Courage, The Killer Angels, and Cold Mountain; Whitman's poetry and Winslow Homer's painting; or the pull of the abstract idea of the triumph of freedom. With maps and a brief discussion of the Battle of the Wilderness for those not familiar with the landscape and actors, Bloody Promenade provides a personal tour of one of the most savage engagements of the Civil War, then offers a lively discussion of its aftermath.
Author: Timothy B. Smith
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1572339888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ulysses S. Grant once remarked that the Battle of Shiloh “has been perhaps less understood, or, to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood, than any other engagement . . . during the entire rebellion.” In Rethinking Shiloh, Timothy B. Smith seeks to rectify these persistent myths and misunderstandings, arguing that some of Shiloh’s story is either not fully examined or has been the result of a limited and narrow collective memory established decades ago. Continuing the work he began in The Untold Story of Shiloh, Smith delves even further into the story of Shiloh and examines in detail how the battle has been treated in historiography and public opinion. The nine essays in this collection uncover new details about the battle, correct some of the myths surrounding it, and reveal new avenues of exploration. The topics range from a compelling analysis and description of the last hours of General Albert Sidney Johnston to the effect of the New Deal on Shiloh National Military Park and, subsequently, our understanding of the battle. Smith’s careful analyses and research bring attention to the many relatively unexplored parts of Shiloh such as the terrain, the actual route of Lew Wallace’s march, and post-battle developments that affect currently held perceptions of thatfamed clash between Union and Confederate armies in West Tennessee. Studying Shiloh should alert readers and historians to the likelihood of misconceptions in other campaigns and wars—including today’s military conflicts. By reevaluating aspects of the Battle of Shiloh often ignored by military historians, Smith’s book makes significant steps toward a more complete understanding and appreciation of the Shiloh campaign in all of its ramifications.
Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803299273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 83
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets "grows in our consciousness," arousing complex emotions and leaving "a gallery of great human images for our contemplation."
Author: Dane Anthony Morrison
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
ISBN: 1555538509
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Get Book Here
Book Description
How is a sense of place created, imagined, and reinterpreted over time? That is the intriguing question addressed in this comprehensive look at the 400-year history of Salem, Massachusetts, and the experiences of fourteen generations of people who lived in a place mythologized in the public imagination by the horrific witch trials and executions of 1692 and 1693. But from its settlement in 1626 to the present, Salem was, and is, much more than this. In this volume, contributors from a variety of fields examine Salem's multiple urban identities: frontier outpost of European civilization, cosmopolitan seaport, gateway to the Far East, refuge for religious diversity, center for education, and of course, "Witch City" tourist attraction.
Author: Gary W. Gallagher
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807857694
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
Get Book Here
Book Description
Was Robert E. Lee a gifted soldier whose only weaknesses lay in the depth of his loyalty to his troops, affection for his lieutenants, and dedication to the cause of the Confederacy? Or was he an ineffective leader and poor tactician whose reputation was
Author: Edward H. Bonekemper
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621574733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Get Book Here
Book Description
History isn't always written by the winners... Twenty-first-century controversies over Confederate monuments attest to the enduring significance of our nineteenth-century Civil War. As Lincoln knew, the meaning of America itself depends on how we understand that fratricidal struggle. As soon as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms at Appomattox, a group of Confederate officers took up their pens to refight the war for the history books. They composed a new narrative—the Myth of the Lost Cause—seeking to ennoble the sacrifice and defeat of the South, which popular historians in the twentieth century would perpetuate. Unfortunately, that myth would distort the historical imagination of Americans, north and south, for 150 years. In this balanced and compelling correction of the historical record, Edward Bonekemper helps us understand the Myth of the Lost Cause and its effect on the social and political controversies that are still important to all Americans.
Author: Earl J. Hess
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643364367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
The battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, was the defining event in the 292-day campaign around Petersburg, Virginia, in the Civil War and one of the most famous engagements in American military history. Although the bloody combat of that "horrid pit" has been recently revisited as the centerpiece of the novel and film versions of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the battle has yet to receive a definitive historical study. Distinguished Civil War historian Earl J. Hess fills that gap in the literature of the Civil War with Into the Crater. The Crater was central in Ulysses S. Grant's third offensive at Petersburg and required digging of a five-hundred-foot mine shaft under enemy lines and detonating of four tons of gunpowder to destroy a Confederate battery emplacement. The resulting infantry attack through the breach in Robert E. Lee's line failed terribly, costing Grant nearly four thousand troops, among them many black soldiers fighting in their first battle. The outnumbered defenders of the breach saved Confederate Petersburg and inspired their comrades with renewed hope in the lengthening campaign to possess this important rail center. In this narrative account of the Crater and its aftermath, Hess identifies the most reliable evidence to be found in hundreds of published and unpublished eyewitness accounts, official reports, and historic photographs. Archaeological studies and field research on the ground itself, now preserved within the Petersburg National Battlefield, complement the archival and published sources. Hess re-creates the battle in lively prose saturated with the sights and sounds of combat at the Crater in moment-by-moment descriptions that bring modern readers into the chaos of close range combat. Hess discusses field fortifications as well as the leadership of Union generals Grant, George Meade, and Ambrose Burnside, and of Confederate generals Lee, P. G. T. Beauregard, and A. P. Hill. He also chronicles the atrocities committed against captured black soldiers, both in the heat of battle and afterward, and the efforts of some Confederate officers to halt this vicious conduct
Author: Chris Mackowski
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 1611211514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
Get Book Here
Book Description
An exhaustive look at the final hours of the Confederacy’s most audacious general. May 1863. The Civil War was in its third spring, and Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood at the peak of his fame. He had risen from obscurity to become “Old Stonewall,” adored across the South and feared and respected throughout the North. On the night of May 2, however, just hours after Jackson executed the most audacious maneuver of his career and delivered a crushing blow against an unsuspecting Union army at Chancellorsville, disaster struck. The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson recounts the events of that fateful night—considered one of the most pivotal moments of the war—and the tense vigil that ensued as Jackson struggled with a foe even he could not defeat. From Guinea Station, where Jackson crosses the river to rest under the shade of the trees, the story follows Jackson’s funeral and burial, the strange story of his amputated arm, and the creation and restoration of the building where he died (now known as the Stonewall Jackson Shrine). This newly revised and expanded second edition features more than 50 pages of fresh material, including almost 200 illustrations, maps, and eye-catching photos. New appendices allow readers to walk in Jackson’s prewar footsteps through his adopted hometown of Lexington, Virginia; consider the ways Jackson’s memory has been preserved through monuments, memorials, and myths; and explore the misconceptions behind the Civil War’s great What-If: “What if Stonewall had survived his wounds?” With the engaging prose of master storytellers, Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White make The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson a must-read for Civil War novices and buffs alike.
Author: Scott O. Lilienfeld
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444360744
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Get Book Here
Book Description
50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology uses popular myths as a vehicle for helping students and laypersons to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Uses common myths as a vehicle for exploring how to distinguish factual from fictional claims in popular psychology Explores topics that readers will relate to, but often misunderstand, such as 'opposites attract', 'people use only 10% of their brains', and 'handwriting reveals your personality' Provides a 'mythbusting kit' for evaluating folk psychology claims in everyday life Teaches essential critical thinking skills through detailed discussions of each myth Includes over 200 additional psychological myths for readers to explore Contains an Appendix of useful Web Sites for examining psychological myths Features a postscript of remarkable psychological findings that sound like myths but that are true Engaging and accessible writing style that appeals to students and lay readers alike
