Description
A CLASSIC OF CIVIL WAR HISTORY: The Civil War comes alive in this fully restored, 900-page selected edition of the diaries of one of its keenest observers.
Based on the original manuscripts, this new annotated edition vividly captures the impact of the nations worst conflict on the Northern home front.
George Templeton Strong (1820-1875) was perhaps the most trenchant civilian observer of the experience of the Civil War in the North. His diary, alternating between despair and exultation and punctuated by crises and explosive episodes, unfolds like a brilliant historical novel. Strong was particularly attuned to the shifting moods in the North, to what he called the great mass of selfishness, frivolity, invincible prejudice and indifference to national life that hampered the Union war effort.
His eyewitness accountswhether of the 1863 Draft Riots, field hospitals teeming with wounded men, or his meetings with leaders such as Grant and Lincolnare remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail. And while Strongs reflections on the war and the political situation are valuable because they often reflect the pulse of public opinion in the North, as the historian James M. McPherson writes, they also reveal the singular intelligence of an extraordinary writer whose viewsabove all toward President Lincolnevolved over the course of the war.
Carefully selected and rigorously faithful to Strongs handwritten diaries, this Library of America edition presents an entirely new transcription of Strongs text, superseding the only previous version, published in 1952 and now long out of print.
Author: George Templeton Strong
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 01/27/2026
Pages: 912
Weight: 1.24lbs
Size: 8.13h x 5.19w x 1.14d
ISBN: 9781598538250
Language: English
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