Gettysburg: The Last Invasion

Allen C. Guelzo

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, May 14, 2013 - History - 656 pages

Winner of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History

An Economist Best Book of the Year

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

The Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, but never before has a book taken readers so close to the experience of the individual soldier.

Two-time Lincoln Prize winner Allen C. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and the sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett’s Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story of army life in the Civil War: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny, one of history’s epic battles is given extraordinarily vivid new life.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Schmerguls - LibraryThing

5733. Gettysburg The Last Invasion, by Allen C. Guelzo (read 5 Feb 2021) This book, published in 2013, tells all you will ever want to know about the battle. In fact it is maybe excessively detailed ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Stbalbach - LibraryThing

Highly readable yet detailed history of the events leading up to the battle and its aftermath. Guelzo assumes the reader is not conversant with 19th century warfare, and he describes what it's like ...

Contents

• CHAPTER NINE The devil 3 to pay: 139
• CHAPTER TEN You stand alone between the Rebel Army and your homes: 177
• CHAPTER TWELVE Go in South Carolina: 198
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN If the enemy is there tomorrow we must attack him: 212
• PA RT 5 The Second: 235
• CHAPTER lIFlEliN You are to hold this ground at all costs: 257
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN I have never been in a hotterplace: 276
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The supreme moment ofthe war had come: 304
• cHAPTER EIGHTH1N Remember Harpers Ferry: 322
• CHAPTER NINETBEN We are the Louisiana Tigers: 335
• CHAPTER TWENTY Let us have no more retreats: 353
• CHAPTER TWENTYONE The general plan ofattaee was unchanged: 373
• CHAPTER TWENTYTWO Are you going to do your duty today?: 405
• cHAPTER TWENTYFOUR As elear a defieat as our army ever met with: 427
• cHAPrER TWENTYFIVE There is hadfaith somewhere: 441
• Epilogue: 475
• Index: 601

About the author

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, both winners of the Lincoln Prize. Guelzo’s essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in publications ranging from the American Historical Review and Wilson Quarterly to newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Gettysburg: The Last Invasion; Vintage Civil War Library
• Author: Allen C. Guelzo
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013
• ISBN: 0385349645, 9780385349642
• Length: 656 pages
• Subjects: History / Military / United States; History / United States / 19th Century; History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877)