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Stephen M. Klugewicz

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Ten Things You Don’t Know About Robert E. Lee

To those Americans who revere him—sadly, a dwindling number these days—Robert E. Lee is still much a “Marble Man”: the noble face of the antebellum South, the tragic embodiment of the Lost Cause, the “perfect” man, as a contemporary deemed him. Even his admirers are unaware of the some of the more interesting details of the life of this very…
Review Posts

Forrest McDonald and the Art of History

A review of Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (University Press of Kansas, 2004) by Forrest McDonald “History is marble, and remains forever cold, even under the most artistic hand, unless life is breathed into it by the imagination. Then the marble becomes flesh and blood—then it feels, it thinks, it moves, and is immortal.” —Charles Gayarré (1805-1895) It is…
Stephen M. Klugewicz
December 11, 2018
Review Posts

America Aflame

A review of America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield (Bloomsbury Press, 2011). Whether or not the American Civil War might have been avoided has long been a subject of debate among historians. Some, like Allan Nevins and Charles and Mary Beard, saw the war as “an irrepressible conflict,” in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s…