| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Age of Lincoln. By Orville Vernon Burton. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. 420 pp. $27.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-9513-1.)

Perhaps only one book on the Civil War era is more comprehensive and more readable than The Age of Lincoln, and it won the Pulitzer Prize twenty years ago: James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (1988). The two have many similarities. Both provide broad synthetic narratives of the Civil War era. Both blend the general and the specific beautifully. Both begin in the antebellum era and focus on the economic and political changes that generated the secession crisis. Both place soldiers' experiences in the contexts of shifting relationships on the home front. Both include the reflections of men and women, whites and blacks, the wealthy and the poor. And both see the war as generating a host of new problems for the nation to solve in the postwar years. Yet Orville Vernon Burton's narrative moves beyond McPherson's. Burton pushes the Civil War era to the end of the nineteenth century (moving even further than Eric Foner's Reconstruction [1988]). A skilled artisan, he weaves together elements of religious, cultural, western, Native American, and political history. This is the most complete and concise history of the Civil War era that has ever been written.

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