Recently, I listened to two more books on the Civil War. The first was Newt Gingrich's Gettysburg, a historically-based but fictional account of a possible alter-ending to that battle. In Gingrich's account, Lee actually listened to Longstreet and agreed not to the all-out assault against the entrenched Union army but rather to a midnight flanking movement that took the Confederates away from the field after the 2nd day of fighting and on to the Union army's main supply depot at Westminster, Virginia.
The second book was This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. I remember reading a similar book a few years ago that specifically focused on the soldiers killed at Gettysburg and the after-battle status of the bodies and their later burial. Faust's work covers the entire war from Bull Run to Appomattox and the many ways that the massive number of deaths during the Civil War affected the soldiers, their families, politics, the media, people's religious beliefs, and the psychological outlook of our nation afterwards.
The second book was This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. I remember reading a similar book a few years ago that specifically focused on the soldiers killed at Gettysburg and the after-battle status of the bodies and their later burial. Faust's work covers the entire war from Bull Run to Appomattox and the many ways that the massive number of deaths during the Civil War affected the soldiers, their families, politics, the media, people's religious beliefs, and the psychological outlook of our nation afterwards.