Since then, America has devoured a seemingly endless stream of new histories, film, and documentaries about the war. The book was the blasting clap that set off the explosion of popular interest in the war that then greeted Ken Burns’s epoch-making PBS documentary The Civil War when it was released two years later. McPherson miraculously manages between to recount the origins of the war and its progress in virtually every theater of fighting through its entire four years, explain the political maelstrom that engulfed both the North and South, touch on heartbreaking stories of individual warriors, follow the machinations of government officials, and describe the military, cultural, and social consequences of the greatest cataclysm in American history, all while carrying the reader along within a brisk and vivid narrative. The book’s popularity is not hard to explain.
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