Product Description

Challenging conventional views, stretching the minds of Civil War enthusiasts and scholars as only John Michael Priest can, Into the Fight is both a scholarly and a revisionist interpretation of the most famous charge in American history. Using a wide array of sources, ranging from the monuments on the Gettysburg battlefield to the accounts of the participants themselves, Priest here rewrites the conventional thinking about this unusually emotional, yet serious, moment in our Civil War. Starting with a fresh point of view, and with no axes to grind, Into the Fight challenges all interested in that stunning moment in history to rethink their assumptions.

Worthwhile for its use of soldiers’ accounts, valuable for its forcing the reader to rethink the common assumptions about the charge, critics may disagree with this research, but they cannot ignore it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1835398 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.05 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 278 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Priest, the author and/or editor of 11 Civil War books including Before Antietam, has contributed a confusing volume to the massive literature on Gettysburg. The text both begins and ends abruptly, while in between the reader is left wondering what exactly the book is all about. In an effort to bring a fresh perspective to the climax of Gettysburg, Priest has marshaled an impressive array of primary sources, but he fails to bring an overall order to the story. He jumps back and forth among a host of participants, trying to reconstruct Pickett's great attack. The result is a series of disordered, confusing tales bogged down in detail without an underlying connecting theme. The publisher claims that this book brings new insight to the events of July 3, 1863, but except for two appendices, which cover Confederate artillery placement and casualties (and include Priest's conclusion that the artillery bombardment lasted less than an hour), Priest fails to let the reader in on his "fresh interpretation." There is some discussion of historiographical problems in the endnotes, but in general the chaotic text will disappoint most readers. 32 illustrations and 25 maps supplement the text.

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From the Author
John Michael Priest, a high-school teacher in Washington County, Maryland, has written or edited 11 Civil War history books since 1989. He has carried his obsession for the Civil War into the classroom where his students have researched and edited two sets of diaries and memoirs. Acclaimed by many as the soldiers’ historian and by some as a renegade revisionist, he offers a balanced, nonpartisan account of combat as the participants experienced it.