Synopses & Reviews
In 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass promised African Americans that serving in the military offered a sure path to freedom. More than 180,000 black men heeded his call to defend the Union, only to find that the path to equality would not be so straightforward.
Drawing on eye-opening firsthand accounts, Elizabeth D. Leonard restores black soldiers to their place in the arc of American history, from the Civil War and its promise of freedom up to the dawn of the twentieth century and the full retrenchment of Jim Crow. Along the way, Leonard offers a nuanced account of black soldiersand#8217; involvement in the Indian wars, their attempts to desegregate West Point and gain proper recognition for their service, and their experiences during Reconstruction, as blacks worked to secure their place in an ever-changing nation. With abundant primary research, enlivened by memorable characters and vivid descriptions of army life, Men of Color to Arms! is an illuminating portrait of a group of men whose contributions to American history, as this book abundantly demonstrates, merit a more thorough examination.
Review
"A shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying-how Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it." Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"Penetrating....Faust exhumes a wealth of material...to flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often moving portrait of a people torn by grief." Publishers Weekly
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"Faust is particularly qualified to identify and explain the complex social and political implications of the changing nature of death as America's internecine conflict attained its full dimensions." San Francisco Chronicle
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"[An] astonishing new book." The New York Sun
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"The beauty and originality of Faust's book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society." Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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"Fascinating, innovative....Faust returns to the task of stripping from war any lingering romanticism, nobility or social purpose." Eric Foner, The Nation
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"Having always kept the war in her own scholarly sights, Faust offers a compelling reassertion of its basic importance in society and politics alike." Slate
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"A moving work of social history, detailing how the Civil War changed perceptions and behaviors about death....An illuminating study." Kirkus Reviews
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and#8220;The richness of [Leonardand#8217;s] stories shines through, and first-person accounts of hardships suffered on the plains are especially gripping.and#8221;and#8212;Publishers Weekly
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and#8220;Brimming with life and in the words of those who struggled, Men of Color to Arms! is an indispensable addition to African-American historical literature. Those unfamiliar with this overlooked and long-neglected story will find illumination in Leonardand#8217;s highly recommended book.and#8221;and#8212;James A. Percoco, Civil War News
Review
and#8220;One of the most useful books to come out of the United States in recent years. . . . Leonard looses a cannon of detail that embraces both Army life and the tests that they faced to gain equality.and#8221;and#8212;Colin Gardiner, Oxford Times
Review
and#8220;Once again Elizabeth Leonard demonstrates the versatility and range of her skills as a historian and writer. This penetrating account of the black regular regiments in the U.S. army after the Civil War joins her earlier studies of women during the Civil War and the prosecutors of Lincolnand#8217;s assassins on a select shelf of important books.and#8221;and#8212;James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry for Freedom
Review
and#8220;Men of Color to Arms! is not only the most complete study ever written of the important service black soldiers rendered during the Indian wars of the American West, but it also offers in clear and finely crafted prose new insight into the role their service played in the larger context of the struggle of blacks for equal rights in the decades following the Civil War.and#8221;and#8212;Peter Cozzens, author of Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign
Review
and#8220;Leonardand#8217;s study is notable for recovering from the record, often from first-hand accounts, a plethora of names and cameos of black soldiers to give a sense not just of the scale of their participation in and#8216;doing the nationand#8217;s work,and#8217; but [also] its consequences.and#8221;and#8212;Christine Bold, Times Literary Supplement
Review
"It was remarkable, and telling, that well-placed commentators could regard the attacks of September 11 as heralding an end of American 'innocence.' Whatever 'innocence' Americans could claim...was surely lost much earlier, in the 1860s, in the hills, woods, villages, and cornfields of their own country. During those years Americans slaughtered each other in great numbers in what we have come to call the Civil War, and as a consequence they encountered dying and death on a scale never attained before or since. That encounter, Drew Gilpin Faust tells us in her moving, disturbing, suggestive, and elegant book, would not only shock, but also transform, Americans and their nation in ways that resonate to this day." Steven Hahn, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Review
"[A] remarkable work poised, moving, irrigated with the flowing voices of mid-19th-century Americans. Their journals, letters, accounts, songs, sermons and scribblings have the gravitas to reach us across 14 decades, to touch upon our own preoccupations with an unexpectedly long war and the nature of national sacrifice." Karen Long, The Cleveland Plain Dealer (read the entire Plain Dealer review)
Synopsis
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - An extraordinary ... profoundly moving history of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation.
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation.
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.
Synopsis
The president of Harvard University presents this innovative study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and consequences of death in the face of the unprecedented slaughter of the Civil War. 56 illustrations.
About the Author
Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.