Word: catton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. Bruce Catton, 78, pre-eminent Civil War historian and journalist who won a 1954 Pulitzer Prize for his first trilogy's concluding volume, A Stillness at Appomattox; in Frankfort, Mich. As a child, Catton listened to the yarns of Civil War veterans in his Michigan home town. A World War I veteran who pursued a peacetime career as a newspaperman, he tried to write a Civil War novel when he was 50. "I got 200 pages down, and it was awful," he recalled. "But the factual parts, where the armies were moving, when the battles were fought, that...
Starting in the mid-'50s, perhaps after publication of Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox in 1953, Americans developed a kind of hobbyist's passion for the Civil War. It may even have been a subliminally sinister fad. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision reawakened sectional fervors-an Impulse in some to fight it out again, not on crass and specific racial grounds but over the once bloody, somehow romantic battlegrounds of history. Buffs dragged their children in Yankee or Rebel caps over the cemetery farm land of Gettysburg, fast growing commercial. Book clubs...
...same year that Michigan-born Catton won his Pulitzer Prize for A Stillness at Appomattox, Mississippi-born Novelist Shelby Foote began what was to have been a short, one-volume history of the war. Now, 20 years and 2,934 pages later, he has completed his history with this third volume. It is a pity that the Civil War fad seems to have abated; a historical narrative as rich in detail and purely exciting as Foote's deserves an audience of amateurs as well as professionals...
Unlike Nevins and Catton, Foote devotes little space to the political context of the war-the angry riptides of the 1850s, the drift into disaster. His attention is focused on the righting itself -fortifications, tactics, the strange chemistries of leadership, the workings in the generals' minds. Among other things, Foote moves armies and great quantities of military information with a lively efficiency. This volume covers the final year of the war, from the campaigns in western Louisiana and Arkansas to the terrible endgame in the East, with Grant clamping down on Petersburg and Richmond and Sherman burning...
...does in his moments of emotional oratory, Nixon seems to have gone beyond the bounds of fact and good taste. A sample of Lincoln scholars was appalled. "I'm outraged," said Donald. "I don't see a hell of a lot of parallel myself," said Historian Bruce Catton...