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The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War. By David J. Eicher. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Pp. 976. Cloth, $40.00.)
James M. McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom is commonly referred to as the most useful single-volume study of the Civil War. David J. Eicher's massive nine-hundred-page history of the war is an attempt to supplement McPherson's focus on social, economic, and military history with a detailed study of the military side of the war. The author believes this is necessary for two reasons: first, military histories by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote are outdated; second, since the publication of Battle Cry of Freedom in 1989, there has been a significant increase in the number of studies that have shed new light on many long-standing assumptions surrounding various aspects of the Civil War.
Eicher is well aware of recent Civil War studies because of his work on a bibliographical study titled The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography. There are many places in this book where his knowledge of the historical terrain appears, including detailed accounts of artillery, various kinds of wounds, prisons, railroads, shipbuilding, clandestine operations, and the role of African Americans...