Fateful Lightning

Download or read book The Fateful Lightning written by Jeff Shaara and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Jeff Shaara comes the riveting final installment in the Civil War series that began with A Blaze of Glory and continued in A Chain of Thunder and The Smoke at Dawn. November 1864: As the Civil War rolls into its fourth bloody year, the tide has turned decidedly in favor of the Union. A grateful Abraham Lincoln responds to Ulysses S. Grant’s successes by bringing the general east, promoting Grant to command the entire Union war effort, while William Tecumseh Sherman now directs the Federal forces that occupy all of Tennessee. In a massive surge southward, Sherman conquers the city of Atlanta, sweeping aside the Confederate army under the inept leadership of General John Bell Hood. Pushing through northern Georgia, Sherman’s legendary March to the Sea shoves away any Rebel presence, and by Christmas 1864 the city of Savannah falls into the hands of “Uncle Billy.” Now there is but one direction for Sherman to go. In his way stands the last great hope for the Southern cause, General Joseph E. Johnston. In the concluding novel of his epic Civil War tetralogy, Jeff Shaara tells the dramatic story of the final eight months of battle from multiple perspectives: the commanders in their tents making plans for total victory, as well as the ordinary foot soldiers and cavalrymen who carried out their orders until the last alarum sounded. Through Sherman’s eyes, we gain insight into the mind of the general who vowed to “make Georgia howl” until it surrendered. In Johnston, we see a man agonizing over the limits of his army’s power, and accepting the burden of leading the last desperate effort to ensure the survival of the Confederacy. The Civil War did not end quietly. It climaxed in a storm of fury that lay waste to everything in its path. The Fateful Lightning brings to life those final brutal, bloody months of fighting with you-are-there immediacy, grounded in the meticulous research that readers have come to expect from Jeff Shaara. Praise for The Fateful Lightning “Powerful and emotional . . . highly recommended.”—Historical Novels Review “Outstanding . . . Shaara combines his extensive knowledge of military history with his consummate skill as a storyteller.”—Booklist “Readers . . . looking for an absorbing novel will be well rewarded.”—The Clarion-Ledger “A great accomplishment and a more than fitting conclusion to Shaara’s work on the Civil War.”—Bookreporter

Download or read book Fateful Lightning written by Allen C. Guelzo and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at the Civil War and how it shaped American history and culture, includes coverage of major figures and the war's affect on politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology.

Download or read book Fateful Lightning written by Allen C. Guelzo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War is the greatest trauma ever experienced by the American nation, a four-year paroxysm of violence that left in its wake more than 600,000 dead, more than 2 million refugees, and the destruction (in modern dollars) of more than $700 billion in property. The war also sparked some of the most heroic moments in American history and enshrined a galaxy of American heroes. Above all, it permanently ended the practice of slavery and proved, in an age of resurgent monarchies, that a liberal democracy could survive the most frightful of challenges. In Fateful Lightning, two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. And unlike other surveys of the Civil War era, it extends the reader's vista to include the postwar Reconstruction period and discusses the modern-day legacy of the Civil War in American literature and popular culture. Guelzo also puts the conflict in a global perspective, underscoring Americans' acute sense of the vulnerability of their republic in a world of monarchies. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and especially the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South. Written by a leading authority on our nation's most searing crisis, Fateful Lightning offers a vivid and original account of an event whose echoes continue with Americans to this day.

Download or read book The Fateful Lightning written by Kathleen Diffley and published by Print Culture in the South. This book was released on 2021 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "is the second volume of Diffley's trilogy on Civil War magazine fiction, called Making War Civil ... In Fateful Lightning, Diffley traces the sectional conflicts in a postwar nation, and how region shaped the political agendas of these post-war editorials. Diffley argues that the journals she looks at in this project present stories that give 'unpredictable' results of sectional conflict and commemorate the Civil War differently from the Northeast publishing establishments. Diffley threads this through her analysis of four literary journals: the Baltimore's Southern Magazine, Charlotte's The Land We Love, Chicago's Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco's Overland Monthly"--

Download or read book That Fateful Lightning written by Richard Parry and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a village outside Saratoga Springs, New York, a weakened man sits with pen in hand, looking back at a life dominated by failure: as a farmer, a businessman, a politician--everything but as a soldier. Racked by cancer, Ulysses S. Grant is entering his final months, facing the prospect of leaving his beloved wife penniless. Now he begins one last campaign--to bring to life the only thing of value he still commands: his memoirs. In the weeks and days that follow, Grant tells a story of war and peace, of friends and enemies, and of a man born for one singular purpose--to lead an army into battle, and to lead it to victory. In this extraordinary novel, Richard Parry takes us on a powerful journey through the Civil War as seen through the shrewd, unwavering eyes of its most enigmatic and least understood protagonist. For as Grant wages a duel against death itself, and his friends and family gather around him, he reveals with stunning clarity his vision of the war: at once a tragedy and a challenge, a nightmare and a puzzle, an epic of carefully laid strategies and counter-strategies as well as a strokes of inexplicable, decisive chance. Within these pages we meet such powerful historical figures as Mark Twain, the book publisher trying desperately to rescue Grant from poverty in the last year of his life; William Tecumseh Sherman, brilliant and dynamic, but also unsure and sorely in need of Grant's nurturing in war and life; and General Robert E. Lee, whose differences from Grant vividly illustrate the cultural and social divide at the core of the Civil War. A rich, vivid, and action-packed addition to our nation's literature of the Civil War, That Fateful Lightning is apowerful portrait of a uniquely American hero, a simple but misunderstood man who felt truly at peace only amid the horror and chaos of war.

Download or read book Fateful Lightning written by William R. Forstchen and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The latest chapter in a unique, epic military science fiction series that sweeps from Civil War America to a time-warped world of horrifying conflict. The Civil War Yankees, lost in another world and time, find themselves part of a tactical retreat from the onslaught of the mysterious Merki hordes, reenacting the Russian retreats against the French and Germans.

Download or read book Writing History with Lightning written by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films possess virtually unlimited power for crafting broad interpretations of American history. Nineteenth-century America has proven especially conducive to Hollywood imaginations, producing indelible images like the plight of Davy Crockett and the defenders of the Alamo, Pickett’s doomed charge at Gettysburg, the proliferation and destruction of plantation slavery in the American South, Custer’s fateful decision to divide his forces at Little Big Horn, and the onset of immigration and industrialization that saw Old World lifestyles and customs dissolve amid rapidly changing environments. Balancing historical nuance with passion for cinematic narratives, Writing History with Lightning confronts how movies about nineteenth-century America influence the ways in which mass audiences remember, understand, and envision the nation’s past. In these twenty-six essays—divided by the editors into sections on topics like frontiers, slavery, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, and the West—notable historians engage with films and the historical events they ostensibly depict. Instead of just separating fact from fiction, the essays contemplate the extent to which movies generate and promulgate collective memories of American history. Along with new takes on familiar classics like Young Mr. Lincoln and They Died with Their Boots On, the volume covers several films released in recent years, including The Revenant, 12 Years a Slave, The Birth of a Nation, Free State of Jones, and The Hateful Eight. The authors address Hollywood epics like The Alamo and Amistad, arguing that these movies flatten the historical record to promote nationalist visions. The contributors also examine overlooked films like Hester Street and Daughters of the Dust, considering their portraits of marginalized communities as transformative perspectives on American culture. By surveying films about nineteenth-century America, Writing History with Lightning analyzes how movies create popular understandings of American history and why those interpretations change over time.