Gathering a treasure trove of powerful, rare, and haunting original documents, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo presents a uniquely readable and intimate oral history of the Civil War’s turning point. We hear from a Union staff officer, a Confederate amputee, artilleryman, a sympathetic Northern woman, a Union prisoner-of-war, Union colonels and Confederate generals, a drummer boy, a fearful college student, those who orchestrated the Battle of Gettysburg, those who survived it, and those who would perish. With introductions from Guelzo, a detailed order of battle, and comprehensive list of every unit that fought, each of these original maps, personal letters, excerpts from forgotten memoirs, and more never-before-published documents offers an unprecedented narrative of the Great Rebellion and the impetus for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – in the authentic words of fire, blood, and smoke by those who saw the battle, heard its din, trembled in its crash, and struggled with its aftermath.

Allen C. Guelzo is a New York Times best-selling author, senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and the director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship for Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Description courtesy of Citadel Press.