While top-down or bottom-up historical accounts will tell you about the big shapes and grand arcs of the civil war - the "Grand Remonstrance", the carnage at Naseby, the cancelling of Christmas - it is in the odd, human details that you begin to touch the real texture of the times. For it is here, in the tiny gestures of the everyday - often contradictory, ambiguous or confused - that you begin to get close to what it would have been like to live through the nine momentous years from 1640 to 1649. Williams exposes this 'rich man's war and poor man's fight' for what Whitman called a 'seething hell.It is this concentration on the small, personal act that makes Diane Purkiss's study of the English civil war such a rich one. "A more competent and honest portrait is available for future generations."- Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Highly recommended."- Library Journal "Through his exhaustive research. In so doing it recovers the long-overlooked perspectives and forgotten voices of one of the defining chapters of American history. Richly illustrated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, this pathbreaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America's most destructive conflict.Ī People's History of the Civil War is "readable social history" which "sheds fascinating light" ( Publishers Weekly) on this crucial period. Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War though the eyes of ordinary people-foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others.
Widely praised upon its initial release, it was described as "meticulously researched and persuasively argued" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Book Synopsis The acclaimed sweeping history of a nation at war with itself, told here for the first time by the people who lived itīottom-up history at its very best, A People's History of the Civil War "does for the Civil War period what Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States did for the study of American history in general" ( Library Journal).
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