Volume 49, Number 10 · June 13, 2002
Could the South Have Won?
By James M. McPherson
Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America
by William C. Davis
Free Press, 484 pp., $35.00
The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
by William W. Freehling
Oxford University Press, 238 pp., $27.50
Lee and His Army in Confederate History
by Gary W. Gallagher
University of North Carolina Press, 295 pp., $29.95
The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills
University Press of Virginia, 345 pp., $34.95
The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).
Review, 3180 words
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