Fate Worse than Hell

American Prisoners of the Civil War

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

356 kr

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Beskrivning

It is newly estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War but less well known is that roughly 400,000 were captured and imprisoned–a milestone in the history of mass dehumanisation. Many POWs died from starvation, dysentery and exposure, and at the worst of the prison pens, more than 30,000 soldiers were caged. A Fate Worse Than Hell contemplates the roots and consequences of this mass incarceration from America’s bloodiest conflict. Based on first-person prisoner accounts, photographs and contemporaneous journalism, W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows how POW camps were politicised by stalled negotiations and escalating retaliation between the Union and the Confederacy. Brundage also shows how prisons such as were the catalyst for the country’s first formal laws of war, which became a bedrock for international law. A Fate Worse Than Hell exposes this national violence that imprisoned more Americans during wartime than ever before or since.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-02-24
Mått:160 x 236 x 36 mm
Vikt:661 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:464
Förlag:WW Norton & Co
ISBN:9780393541090

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Mer om författaren

Guggenheim Fellow W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book Civilizing Torture, he lives in Chapel Hill.

Recensioner i media

"Americans generally prefer to forget the horror of Civil War prisons. Fitz Brundage, one of our greatest historians in the archive and on the page, has written a masterpiece that will go a long way toward changing such amnesia. As Brundage demonstrates in a heroic achievement of research, including in photography, Civil War prisons were 'milestones in dehumanization,' but they were also an unprecedented story of law, policy, political retaliation, military 'design and resolve,' even a modern 'innovation' that brought the very concept of slavery into focus. Every chapter delves deeply into the gruesome experience of real people we get to know in what is simply a beautiful narrative about an enormously ugly subject. From the first prisoners of 1861 to the massive cemeteries that dot the nation's landscape, and to the question of responsibility for such suffering and death, Brundage has brilliantly illuminated this 'alien' world, and written a new Civil War epic."