Product Description

As the author notes, the Civil War saw many daring assaults and stout defenses other than Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Why then, is it this maneuver--and not, for example, Richardson's Charge at Antietam or Humphrey's Assault on Fredericksburg--that looms so large in the popular imagination? This innovative study reveals why Pickett's Charge endures so strongly. 23 illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #485662 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 296 pages

Amazon.com Review
Pickett's Charge--the Confederates' desperate (and failed) attempt to break the Union lines on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg--is best remembered as the turning point of the U.S. Civil War. But Penn State historian Carol Reardon reveals how hard it is to remember the past accurately, especially when an event such as this one so quickly slipped into myth. She writes, "From the time the battle smoke cleared, Pickett's Charge took on this chameleonlike aspect and, through a variety of carefully constructed nuances, adjusted superbly to satisfy the changing needs of Northerners, Southerners, and, finally, the entire nation." With care and detail, Reardon's fascinating book teaches a lesson in the uses and misuses of history.

Review
Whoever defined history as an agreed-upon lie was not acquainted with the aftermath of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Journalists could see no more than a fraction of the action, if they saw any at all. Participants saw even less. It took five days for definite word of Lee's defeat to reach Richmond (in bootlegged northern papers) and longer for it to travel south. Newspapers were filled with melodramatic babble, and battle survivors, when consulted, contradicted one another. Even the duration of the initial Confederate artillery attack remains in dispute; estimates range from minutes to hours. Such discrepancies are not, however, the real focus of Ms. Reardon's investigation. She examines the mixture of local patriotism (Virginia), local resentment (North Carolina, et al.), Reconstruction politics, campaigns for reconciliation, and moonlight-and-magnolia fiction that eventually made Gettysburg the best-known battle of the Civil War and Pickett's Charge the heroic high point of the Rebel cause. Ms. Reardon's text is well supplied with anecdote and quotation and covers events as recent as a 1922 Marine Corps re-enactment of the action to see "What would have happened at Gettysburg if the armies of Meade and Lee had met with modern weapons and equipment?" The conclusion: Lee would have lost, but given air observation, he probably would not have launched an attack against "the entire Army of the Potomac." Quite apart from its notable historical interest, Ms. Reardon's work is a splendidly lively study of the manipulation, not necessarily deliberate or malign, of public opinion. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams

Review
A fresh look at the disastrous assault.

New Yorker

[A] splendidly lively study of the manipulation, not necessarily deliberate or malign, of public opinion.

Atlantic Monthly

This fine book provides vivid evidence of just how far we will go to alchemize fantasy into fact.

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Thought provoking and highly interesting, Reardon's book is a pleasure to read.

Orlando Sentinel

[Brings] together the various threads of most of the contemporary and historical arguments surrounding the charge.

Journal of Military History

Customer Reviews

Truth Ever Elusive
Ms. Reardon's wonderful book underscores the challenge that we all face as we read and attempt to separate fact from fiction and fancy.This book is a case study in the mysterious confluence of objective history and subjective history. Ms Reardon deftly takes the reader from July 3, 1863, the day of Pickett's Charge, to the present day and shows how elusive the truth is. As an avid student of the American Civil War in particular and history in general,I learned three very important lessons from Ms Reardon. First, the thundering violence and confusion of battle make the search for the truth exceedingly difficult. The actual participants in Pickett's Charge were able to vividly and tellingly relate their emotions at the time. However, their reports of actual events and actions were understandably contradictory. Second, as Ms Reardon illuminates throughout the book, the careful reader must consider the possible motives of the author while reading the work. Ms Reardon demonstrates that the Virginia Historical Society was more interested in protecting state pride than searching for the truth. The numerous instances of conflicting accounts of this single day of the Civil War reminds me of Richard Nixon's resopnse to the question of how history will judge him : "It depends on who writes the history ". One can call Nixon's response cynical, but Ms Reardon reminds us that the wise reader will posses a healthy skepticism. Finally, when one pores through a Civil War book,or any book on warfare for that matter, the reader must understand that the neat maps of the terrain and the formations belie the utter confusion,terror, and violence inherent in battle.

Ms Reardon won me over with her eye for the telling detail when she pointed out that the terrain prevented both Union and Confederate soldiers from a panaromic view of the battlefield.The rolling hills prevented the Union troops from seeing large parts of the charge. Meanwhile, a gentle ridge split the attacking Confederates in half. Ms Reardon ruefully notes that numerous historical accounts from both sides provide intimate details of things that were not visible from the participant's location.

Ms Reardon quotes a grizzled veteran who summed it all up when he said,"Picketts Charge has been so grossly exaggerated and misrepresented as to give some color to the oft-repeated axiom that 'history is an agreed-upon lie'."

Must reading for anyone really interested in history.
This book ranks among a tiny handful of works that anyone who really wants to understand history and historical processes, military or otherwise, should read. The title grossly understates the real subject. In concepts and content, this book stands with John Keegan's The Face of Battle, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, Carl Builder's The Masks of War, and Viktor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning for insights into how individual human minds and groups work, turn isolated events into memory and history, and then have large-scale influences. Even among these, only Fussell and Reardon tie the threads together. With Pickett's Charge as a case study, Carol Reardon's project is two-fold. First she traces how a small, bloody episode in a long, bloody war quickly and irreversibly became attached to and glorified a minor figure in that episode. Second she traces how, in popular memory and myth, that episode came to codify that entire war. In carrying out these two projects, she hits at a complex array of core issues on several levels. For example, she analyzes how soldiers perceive, imbed in memory, privately recall, reprocess, and publicly retell their experiences. What she says of combat veterans applies equally to survivors of many kinds of catastrophe. She shows how the innate human desire to make sense of isolated bits of experience and, thus, achieve meaning in our lives, drives people to impose an artificial order on and attach extraneous material to experience that distorts memory and any record of an event. The elements and dynamics she describes apply equally well to any human experience and to any historical sources and topics. In discussing how the public awareness and interpretation of the events from the Civil War evolved, she describes a process that applies to anything that makes CNN today. In the current climate of interest in national values, her discussion of how the image of George Pickett portrayed through his adherents--most notably, his sycophantic and energetic wife--blended with prevailing Victorian emphases on virtue to magnify his role and the significance of the event. Reardon gives important insights into the well-trodden but currently-important subject of nationalism. Most important is what she says about the process of national formation. The political process she described to find and cement points of agreement on passionately divisive issues is tragically relevant--largely, in the negative--to efforts at peacemaking in many places today, such as Bosnia, the former Soviet states, and the Middle East. Particularly germane to scholars is her insight that, to achieve any immediate political and social goal, most people will eagerly sacrifice accuracy of historical description and analysis. Orwell's dark vision in 1984 of an overarching, totalitarian regime rewriting history and punishing those who try to preserve Truth is far less a real threat than the collective effects of banal, spontaneous, individual daily activities. An extension of the process she describes to other places and times can go a long way toward understanding how in Bosnia, for example, neighbors and even family members readily denounced, turned on, and even brutally murdered one another. The same applies equally well to persistent turbulence in many other trouble spots. Despite its focus on the American Civil War, this book has universal significance and demands reading by anyone genuinely interested in the social sciences. Once finished, a thoughtful reader can expect to feel much wiser but slightly to deeply disturbed. Jim Williams--former director of oral history and lessons learned programs, U.S. Army Military History Institute/Army War College; historian for multinational peacekeeping forces in Bosnia; combat commander; Ph.D. in history and sociology.

An unusual and informative look at the Battle of Gettysburg
About 3 years ago, I read the 3 books Gary Gallagher edited that are essay collections on the battle of Gettysburg. While the books dealing with the first and second day had interesting material in them, the one on the third day had a truly interesting essay on Pickett's Charge, by a woman who's a military historian. I'm sure she's sick of hearing it, but female military historians are rather rare, so I read it with some interest. It was worth my time, definitely, and this book is an expansion of the themes presented in the essay.

Gettysburg is a controversial subject, and while there has been much ink spilled adding to the controversy, this book instead aims to dissect the controversy surrounding the denoument of the whole event: Pickett's Charge. Reardon first covers the events of the charge very briefly, then wades right in and recounts the memory and history of the event as it developed over the years. There's a whole chapter, for instance, on the efforts of the North Carolina historical societies and veterans' organizations trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Tarheels who fought during Pickett's Charge, because they were blamed (by Virginians in Pickett's division and elsewhere) for the defeat. Watching the history of an event unfold and change as the generations pass is enthralling, and Reardon tells the story skillfully, keeping the pace up nicely and showing a formidable command of publications on the Battle and Pickett's Charge itself...

All in all, a truly remarkable book and one well worth reading. A 9 is the highest rating I've given here; and I've rated 10 or 15 books now.