'Goodheart is an elegant writer and this is a highly readable introduction to America's great civil conflict.' 'Doing what David McCullough's 1776 did for the American Revolution, Goodheart's book delivers a remarkably original and gripping account of the year the Civil War began.' Enlightening, insightful, and yes, entertaining.' Goodheart brings us into the world of mid-nineteenth-century America, as ambiguous and ambitious and fractured as the times we live in now, and he brings to pulsing life the hearts and minds of its American citizens.' Goodheart gives readers a sense of what it was like to have been there.' Tony Horwitz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Confederates in the Attic Penetrating, eloquent, and deeply moving, this is a classic introduction to the nation's greatest conflict.' ' 1861 is the best book I have ever read on the start of the Civil War. He takes what is known, breaks it down to its elemental parts and rearranges it, giving us a different view entirely of something we thought we understood entirely.' 'Goodheart shows us that even at 150 years' distance there are new voices, and new stories, to be heard about the Civil War, and that together they can have real meaning. The books will renew one's excitement about reading history.' 'Goodheart writes with precision, beauty and understanding. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom 'Adam Goodheart is a Monet with a pen instead of a paintbrush.'

Hardly a page of this book lacks an insight of importance or a fact that beguiles the reader.' 1861 creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine.' Includes black-and-white photos and illustrations. Hailed as '.' by The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart's bestseller 1861 is an important addition to the Civil War canon. Their stories take us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the waters of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at its moment of ultimate crisis and decision.

A gripping and original account of how the Civil War began and a second American revolution unfolded, setting Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom.Īn epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields, 1861 introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes-among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer's wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president.

1861 by adam goodheart