Infinitely readable and absorbing, Bruce Catton’s The Civil War is one of the most widely read general histories of the war available in a single volume.

America needed its great war of brothers, wrote Bruce Catton, to weld in a terrible fire what had been and what might be. The story of the war needs retelling because it helped to change the future of the human race.

The Civil War is America’s great Iliad, and few would dispute that its outcome is evident in most social and political issues today. For a person seeking a single volume to serve as a captivating introduction and a dependable guide through all the maze of battles and issues of the Civil War, this is a book without parallel. Catton understood the Civil War, its participants and battles, and he unfolds it with skill and simplicity, from the early division of the North and South to the final surrender of the Confederate troops. Of all historians past and present, Bruce Catton ranks among the best.