John Keegan, The American Civil War: A Military History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 416 pp.; index, photographs, maps. Hardcover, $35.00; ISBN: 978-0-307-26343-8; Paperback, $16.95; ISBN: 978-0-307-27493-9
British historians have long been fascinated by the American Civil War. To give but two examples: In 1926, the first book by David Knowles, a Benedictine monk best known now for his volumes on medieval monasticism, was The American Civil War; the middle third of the fourth and final volume of Winston Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples ( 1958) recounts the American Civil War. Now John Keegan, for forty years a formidable name among military historians, contributes his own book on the subject, one he has been studying for much of his career. From his days as an undergraduate at Oxford until now, he has returned again and again to the battlefields, letters, and memoirs of the American Civil War. In 1987 his The Mask of Command featured, alongside Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington, and Adolf Hitler, Ulysses S. Grant; in 1995 his Fields of Battle (published in the U. K. as Warpaths) discussed several battles waged on United States soil, including the Peninsula Campaign. In this fine book he sums up the Civil War as "an entirely new way of warfare, a struggle between beliefs fought by populations quite untrained to fight."
As were Knowles and Churchill, Keegan was trained in the classical school of writing history: judicious assessments conveyed by fluent narrative prose, summoning vivid scenes and informed by contemporary documents. The standard was set in the second half of the eighteenth century by Edward Gibbon and has its practitioners still. In the United States, the style has also been much admired, from the days of William H. Prescott and Francis Parkman to such recent masters as Paul Horgan and David McCullough. Keegan, on the Civil War, does not disappoint aficionados of the genre. As he has done in most of his books, here Keegan reveals the eye of an essayist, excelling at the selected vignette and character sketch. It should be noted that parts of this book appeared as articles in Civil War Times and Military History Quarterly. The essayist's approach serves also to reinforce certain points by means of repetition.
With the 2011 issue of Cumberland County History, a new feature will appear in the Journal. The new feature will be an opportunity for our readers to learn more about the extensive and varied collections housed at the Cumberland County Historical Society in irs library, museum, and photo archives.