Albert Castel - Böcker

Following a skirmish on June 28, 1864, a truce is called so the North can remove their dead and wounded. For two hours, Yankees and Rebels mingle, with some of the latter even assisting the former in their grisly work. Newspapers are exchanged. Northern coffee is swapped for Southern tobacco. Yanks crowd around two Rebel generals, soliciting and obtaining autographs.As they part, a Confederate calls to a Yankee, "I hope to miss you, Yank, if I happen to shoot in your direction." "May I, never hit you Johnny if we fight again," comes the reply.The reprieve is short. A couple of months, dozens of battles, and more than 30,000 casualties later, the North takes Atlanta.One of the most dramatic and decisive episodes of the Civil War, the Atlanta Campaign was a military operation carried out on a grand scale across a spectacular landscape that pitted some of the war's best (and worst) general against each other.In Decision in the West, Albert Castel provides the first detailed history of the Campaign published since Jacob D. Cox's version appeared in 1882. Unlike Cox, who was a general in Sherman's army, Castel provides an objective perspective and a comprehensive account based on primary and secondary sources that have become available in the past 110 years.Castel gives a full and balanced treatment to the operations of both the Union and Confederate armies from the perspective of the common soldiers as well as the top generals. He offers new accounts and analyses of many of the major events of the campaign, and, in the process, corrects many long-standing myths, misconceptions, and mistakes. In particular, he challenges the standard view of Sherman's performance.Written in present tense to give a sense of immediacy and greater realism, Decision in the West demonstrates more definitively than any previous book how the capture of Atlanta by Sherman's army occurred and why it assured Northern victory in the Civil War.

This book talks about the short, savage life of a civil war guerrilla. Nowhere was the Civil War as savage as it was in Missouri - and nowhere did it produce a killer more savage than William Anderson. For a brief but dramatic period, ""Bloody Bill"" played the leading role in the most violent arena of the entire war - and did so with a vicious abandon that spread fear throughout the land. A name associated with William Quantrill and Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson was known for never taking prisoners. A former horse thief turned bushwhacker, he became the scourge of Kansas and Missouri with a reputation for unspeakable atrocities. Sometimes he left the bodies of dead Federal soldiers scalped, skinned, and castrated. Sometimes he decapitated them and rearranged their heads. Wherever Bloody Bill rode, the Grim Reaper rode alongside. In telling this story of bitter bloodshed, historians Castel and Goodrich track Bloody Bill's reign of terror over increasingly violent raids. He rode with Quantrill in the infamous sack of Lawrence and killed more victims than any other raider. Then he led the brutal Centralia Massacre, a blood-soaked nightmare recounted here hour-by-hour from firsthand accounts. More than compiling a chronicle of horrors, Castel and Goodrich have produced the first full-fledged account of Anderson's career. They examine his prewar life, explain how he became a guerrilla, then describe the war that he and his men waged against Union soldiers and defenseless civilians alike. The authors' disagreements on many aspects of Anderson's gruesome career add a fascinating dimension to the book. Only 26 when he was killed charging an ambush, Bloody Bill Anderson had already become a legend. This book takes readers behind the legend and provides a closer look at the man - and at the face of terror.

Make no mistake, the Confederacy had the will and valor to fight. But the Union had the manpower, the money, the materiel, and, most important, the generals. Although the South had arguably the best commander in the Civil War in Robert E. Lee, the North's full house beat their one-of-a-kind. Flawed individually, the Union's top officers nevertheless proved collectively superior across a diverse array of battlefields and ultimately produced a victory for the Union.Now acclaimed author Albert Castel brings his inimitable style, insight, and wit to a new reconsideration of these generals. With the assistance of Brooks Simpson, another leading light in this field, Castel has produced a remarkable capstone volume to a distinguished career. In it, he reassesses how battles and campaigns forged a decisive Northern victory, reevaluates the generalship of the victors, and lays bare the sometimes vicious rivalries among the Union generals and their effect on the war.From Shiloh to the Shenandoah, Chickamauga to Chattanooga, Castel provides fresh accounts of how the Union commanders—especially Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, and Meade but also Halleck, Schofield, and Rosecrans—outmaneuvered and outfought their Confederate opponents. He asks of each why he won: Was it through superior skill, strength of arms, enemy blunders, or sheer chance? What were his objectives and how did he realize them? Did he accomplish more or less than could be expected under the circumstances? And if less, what could he have done to achieve more—and why did he not do it? Castel also sheds new light on the war within the war: the intense rivalries in the upper ranks, complicated by the presence in the army of high-ranking non-West Pointers with political wagons attached to the stars on their shoulders. A decade in the writing, Victors in Blue brims with novel, even outrageous interpretations that are sure to stir debate. As certain as the Union achieved victory, it will inform, provoke, and enliven sesquicentennial discussions of the Civil War.

Indeed, the story of General Price - as this account by Albert Castle shows - is the story, in large part, of the Confederacy's struggle in the West. The author draws a fascinating portrait of Price the man - vain, courageous, addicted to secrecy - and produces insightful interpretations and much pertinent information about the Civil War in the West.

This title presents reflections, rejoinders, and rigorous scholarship from the winner of the 1992 Lincoln Prize. ""Winning and Losing in the Civil War"" collects fifteen of the most influential short writings by accomplished Civil War historian Albert Castel, each presented with his trademark wit, style, and analytical precision. The author expounds on some of the most provocative, arresting issues surrounding the war, including the dispute over inevitability of Northern victory and the question of Lee's greatness on and off the battlefield. Castel contemplates presidents and mules, generals and guerrillas, lovers and haters, facts and opinions, actualities and probabilities. In addition, he uses the volume as a forum for reflecting on his role as historian, identifying the primary problem facing present-day practitioners of Civil War historiography, and illumining what remains to be accomplished in this heavily tilled but ever-popular field of scholarly inquiry.