The Civil War in the American West

by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

Overview

As most Americans of the 1860s fixed their attention on the battlefields of Shiloh and Manassas, another war raged on the largely unsettled Western frontier. This splendid work by the author of The Patriot Chiefs restores this "other" Civil War to its true, epic proportions. With formidable scholarship and irresistible narrative ease, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., tells of the Yankee armada that foundered in the Louisiana bayous; of the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states. where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender — two months after Appomattox: and of the U.S. Army's brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians in theaters as far apart as Minnesota and Colorado.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679740032
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/27/1993
Series:	Vintage Civil War Library
Edition description:	1st Vintage Civil War Library ed
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., a leading historian of the American West, was the author of many award-winning books, including The Patriot Chiefs, The Indian Heritage of America, Now That the Buffalo's Gone, The Civil War in the American West, 500 Nations, and A Walk Toward Oregon. He was a vice president and editor of American Heritage magazine, the founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and president of the Western History Association. Josephy died in the fall of 2005.

Editorial Reviews

"Marvelous, original...that great, adventurous, little-known side of the Civil War...is all here for the first time: the clash of North and South set in the immense space of the West and peopled with some of the most vivid characters of that vivid time." — David McCullough"Only occasionally does one find such a felicitous pairing of author and subject as in this important new book.... Mr. Josephy again serves justice with his clear-eyed, even-handed scholarship.... The entire era is cast into a different light by this powerfully wrought narrative."

— The New York Times Book Review

"A sweeping and often surprising account of the untold stories of the war between the states." — Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

This definitive history, BOMC and History Book Club alternates in cloth, is both the first comprehensive examination of the Civil War as it was fought west of the Mississippi and a fine account of the 1861-1865 Indian wars that drew thousands of Union troops away from the main Eastern theaters. Maps. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Josephy has attempted the first one-volume integration of various aspects of the Civil War in the West, ``the western fringe of the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific.'' He has largely succeeded, though some may quibble with his omission of the early struggle in Missouri. Several of the campaigns, such as Sib ley's New Mexican, Bank's Red River, and the Pea Ridge campaign have gener ated a large literature of their own. They are now linked with little-noticed, but horrific Indian campaigns that destroyed more tribes and seized more land than any others. Immensely readable and well documented, The Civil War in the Amer ican West will serve a wide range of readers as a more than adequate introduction to a vast, frequently overlooked theater of the war. BOMC and History Book Club alternates.-- Thomas E. Schott, Office of History, 17th Air Force, Sembach, Germany

Library Journal