Based on the celebrated PBS television series about the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood--the complete text of the magisterial illustrated work of history that The New York Times hailed as a treasure for the eye and mind. The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became good and bad things.... It was the crossroads of our being and it was a hell of a crossroads: the suffering the enormous tragedy of the whole thing. --Shelby Foote from The Civil War Now Geoffrey Ward s magisterial work of history is available in a text-only edition that interweaves the author s narrative with the voices of the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood: not just Abraham Lincoln Frederick Douglass and Robert E. Lee but genteel Southern ladies and escaped slaves cavalry officers and common foot soldiers who fought in Yankee blue and Rebel gray. The Civil War also includes essays by our most distinguished historians of the era: Don E. Fehrenbacher on the war s origins; Barbara J. Fields on the freeing of the slaves; Shelby Foote on the war s soldiers and commanders; James M. McPherson on the political dimensions of the struggle; and C. Vann Woodward assessing the America that emerged from the war s ashes.