Showing results by author "Ernest B Furgurson" in All Categories

For 130 years historians and military strategists have been obsessed by the battle of Chancellorsville. It began with an audaciously planned stroke by Union general Joe Hooker as he sent his army across the Rappahannock River and around Robert E. Lee's lines. It ended with that same army fleeing back in near total disarray - and Hooker's reputation in ruins. This splendid account of Chancellorsville - the first in more than 35 years - explains Lee's most brilliant victory even as it places the battle within the larger canvas of the Civil War.

On the day the first shots of the Civil War were fired, a mob in Richmond clambered on top of the Capitol to raise the Confederate flag. Four years later, another flag was raised in its place while the city burned below. A 13-year-old girl compared the stars and stripes to "so many bloody gashes". This richly detailed, absorbing book brings to life the years in which Richmond was the symbol of Southern independence and the theater for a drama as splendid, sordid, and tragic as the war itself.