Custer's Trials - A Life on the Frontier of a New America

Zusatztext 47307875 Informationen zum Autor T.J. Stiles Klappentext Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for HistoryFrom the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, a brilliant biography of Gen. George Armstrong Custer that radically changes our view of the man and his turbulent times.In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer's legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer's historical caricature, revealing a volatile, contradictory, intense person-capable yet insecure, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (he was court-martialed twice in six years). The key to understanding Custer, Stiles writes, is keeping in mind that he lived on a frontier in time. In the Civil War, the West, and many areas overlooked in previous biographies, Custer helped to create modern America, but he could never adapt to it. He freed countless slaves yet rejected new civil rights laws. He proved his heroism but missed the dark reality of war for so many others. A talented combat leader, he struggled as a manager in the West. He tried to make a fortune on Wall Street yet never connected with the new corporate economy. Native Americans fascinated him, but he could not see them as fully human. A popular writer, he remained apart from Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and other rising intellectuals. During Custer's lifetime, Americans saw their world remade. His admirers saw him as the embodiment of the nation's gallant youth, of all that they were losing; his detractors despised him for resisting a more complex and promising future. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation in Custer's tumultuous marriage to his highly educated wife, Libbie; their complicated relationship with Eliza Brown, the forceful black woman who ran their household; as well as his battles and expeditions. It casts surprising new light on a near-mythic American figure, a man both widely known and little understood. A voice called out to Custer, telling him to come see the observation balloon. He stepped out of the large tent that he shared with three other officers and his dogs and looked up. It was aloft, floating over the Union encampment. He found his field glass in his hand, so he put its twin lenses to his eyes. He was stunned to see two young women from Monroe seated in the basket—women in whom he had a certain interest. He dropped his field glass and ran to the balloon’s base a short distance away. “Let me go up too,” he begged the men in charge of it. They agreed. In a moment he somehow reached the basket high above, “but my friends had gone, much to my disappointment.” He awoke. Unusually, he remembered the dream. “I always deal with realities,” he wrote to his sister. “I am not a believer in dreams”—unlike his mother—“but on the contrary think it absurd to pay any attention to them.” The more he disavowed any significance, the more he implied that the dream haunted him. Two attractive young women appear in his most isolated post, a basket in the air; he suddenly, inexplicably, rises to that great height; they vanish the instant he reaches them. He corners what he desires, yet it escapes him, leaving him bewildered and alone. When he stepped outside of his tent in the morning—awake, this time—he found himself at Harrison’s Landing, the James River bivouac where the Army of the Potomac had retreated after the victory at Malvern Hill. McClellan established his headquarters at Berkeley Plantation, virtually the birthplace of the slaveholding aristocracy in the South. Out of respect, McClellan did not occupy the brick manor house, but ordered tents erected on the grounds. There he brooded on his enemies in the administration. Just after the Battle of Gaine...

Product details

• Authors: T J Stiles, T. J. Stiles, T.J. Stiles
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2015
• EAN: 9780307592644
• ISBN: 978-0-307-59264-4
• No. of pages: 592
• Dimensions: 170 mm x 244 mm x 40 mm
• Series: ALFRED A. KNOPF
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies