the American Civil War for Busy People: Essential Guide to War, Politics, and Crisis That Redesigned America

Everything you think you know about the Civil War is half right. Here is the real war, fast. Blue and gray on a green field, a sorrowful Lincoln, Lee surrendering to Grant: that handful of images is the Civil War most of us carry from school. It leaves out almost everything that matters. This is the book that finally makes the whole thing click. Written for the busy, curious reader who wants the entire picture without a thousand-page tome, it puts the real war back together. It was a military contest, the largest and deadliest ever fought on American soil. It was a constitutional revolution that remade the nation's government. And it was, above all, a moral reckoning over slavery and freedom, the cause the seceding states named openly and the Lost Cause myth later worked so hard to bury. Inside this book: - Why the war really came, beyond the slogans of "states' rights" and "Northern aggression"- Which battles and campaigns actually mattered: Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Appomattox- How the enslaved helped free themselves, and the 180,000 Black soldiers who fought for the Union- Who the leaders really were: Lincoln, Davis, Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Frederick Douglass- How the war remade the Constitution and what the "second founding" left unfinished- The Lost Cause myth, named and corrected, and why the war still shapes America today > Finish it, and you will understand the Civil War better than almost anyone you know.