Would have benefitted from a "Cast of Players" list so reader could keep straight on who various military figures were, and provide refresher on where one had last read about them. Shelby Foote (1989). Conversations with Shelby Foote. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp.37, 46. ISBN 978-0-87805-386-5. With funding and filming taking place in the late 1980s, “The Civil War” did reflect the time in which it was made. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, a best-selling novel from 1974 about the Battle of Gettysburg, still exerted obvious influence. Both of these popular histories were focused almost solely on military history – battles, soldiers, and life on the warfront, and they seemingly guided the general focus of both the editing and production of “The Civil War.”

Shelby Foote Dies - The Washington Post Shelby Foote Dies - The Washington Post

If finishing Foote’s trilogy did not actually make me an adult, it marked the beginning of my serious adult reading. The Civil War: A Narrative, Gettysburg to Draft Riots (40th Anniversaryed.). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life. 1999. ISBN 0-7835-0106-4. In 2003, Foote received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

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Tillinghast, Richard, and Shelby Foote. “An Interview with Shelby Foote.” Ploughshares, vol. 9, no. 2/3, 1983, 120 a b c Huebner, Timothy S.; McGrady, Madeleine M. (Winter 2015). "Shelby Foote, Memphis, and the Civil War in American Memory". Southern Cultures. 21 (4): 25. doi: 10.1353/scu.2015.0044. JSTOR 26220240. S2CID 147664153. Meachem, Jon, ed., American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and his Classic The Civil War: A Narrative (Modern Library 2011) table of contents Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives of our century, a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters.”—Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". Achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.

Shelby Foote | Civil War, Confederate Army, Novelist | Britannica

C. Stuart Chapman (June 20, 2006). Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p.227. ISBN 978-1-57806-932-3.With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives". [3] As the cliché would have it. We are doomed to suffer (and suffer again) the nauseating ripples and echoes of the legacy of American history, if we fail to process all of its effects, heal its ghastly wounds and commit once and for all to a fundamentally better way moving forward. I don’t mean to lay all or even most of the blame at Foote’s feet. However, his work has become immortal, and so it has great influence. The historian W.J. Cash observed that no one wants to believe their heroes fought and died for something “so crass and unbeautiful as the preservation of slavery.” When you read Foote, you can continue to maintain that illusion. After finishing September, September, Foote resumed work on Two Gates to the City, the novel he had set aside in 1954 to write the Civil War trilogy. The work still gave him trouble and he set it aside once more, in the summer of 1978, to write "Echoes of Shiloh," an article for National Geographic Magazine. By 1981, he had given up on Two Gates altogether, though he told interviewers for years afterward that he continued to work on it. [13] He served on the Naval Academy Advisory Board in the 1980s. [50]

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In 1993, Richard N. Current argued that Foote too often depended on a single, unsupported source for lifelike details, but "probably is as accurate as most historians... Foote's monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind." [70] Honey-voiced, sporting a full beard and drawing from a seemingly endless well of war anecdotes, he became a star of Ken Burns's 11-hour public television documentary, which aired in 1990. Described as gregarious, he nevertheless disliked the torrent of sudden interest in his life. He told People magazine, "What I do requires steady work and isolation from all this hoorah."I certainly got what I was looking for in terms of getting a much better understanding of the progression of the war and can now associate these battles I've known the names of for decades within the larger scope of the overall war and the ebb and flow of momentum on each side over the years of the war. Reading this history makes me want to visit these battlefields more than ever. As another example, I have to wonder how the 20th Maine could have held its position on Little Round Top on July 2 had it not been for the stand of the 4th Maine at Devil’s Den, engaging one, perhaps two, Confederate regiments that could otherwise have joined the assault on the Union line. The 4th Maine incurred 140 killed, wounded and captured that day. Meacham, Jon, ed. (2011). American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative . New York: Random House. Huebner, Timothy S., and Madeleine M. McGrady. "Shelby Foote, Memphis, and the Civil War in American memory." Southern Cultures 21#4 (2015), p.13+. online Perhaps the film’s most troubling adherence to Lost Cause lore is its idolatry of Robert E. Lee. The Confederate general is introduced as “the courtly, unknowable aristocrat who disapproved of secession and slavery, yet went on to defend them both at the head of one of the greatest armies of all time.” Lee’s greatness, Burns suggests, was evident from his early days at the military academy West Point, where he did not earn a single demerit. “Classmates called him ‘The Marble Model’ – but liked him in spite of his perfection.” [8] The Robert E. Lee celebrated in this documentary is valiant, tragic, and brave. The real Robert E. Lee was something else entirely.

New Civil War Documentary | History Why We Need a New Civil War Documentary | History

The Civil War: A Narrative, Secession to Fort Henry (40th Anniversaryed.). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life. 1999. ISBN 0-7835-0100-5. Burns, The Civil War; Keri Leigh Merritt, “Why We Need a New Civil War Documentary,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 23, 2019. C. Stuart Chapman. Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006), pp. xix, 185, 186, 201, 202.In any case, by the time I got to the end of this trilogy I was wondering how much longer the blood and suffering could go on. "Until every drop of blood drawn by the lash is repaid by one drawn by the sword," apparently; and beyond. First and foremost, The Civil War: A Narrative is a masterpiece of storytelling. Because Foote wrote fiction, it’s tempting to call this novelistic, but that’s far too reductive. Parts of it read like a novel, it is true. Other parts, though, read like Homer or the Bible. The Civil War is the seminal event in American history. In terms of both drama and importance, it is second to none. Shelby Foote manages to capture that sense, while also bringing these past events to vivid life. In 2017, the conservative writer Bill Kauffman, writing in The American Conservative, argued for a revival of Foote's sympathetic portrayal of the South. [52] The Civil War: A Narrative, Fort Sumter to Kernstown: First Blood–The Thing Gets Under Way. New York: Random House. 2005. ISBN 0-307-29023-9. A stunning book full of color, life, character and a new atmosphere of the Civil War, and at the same time a narrative of unflagging power. Eloquent proof that an historian should be a writer above all else." —Burke Davis