The Civil War: A Narrative, Secession to Fort Henry (40th Anniversaryed.). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life. 1999. ISBN 0-7835-0100-5.

I’ve heard that during the middle of writing The Civil Waryou bought all the dip pens left in the United States. The American Enterprise: Shelby Foote". Archived from the original on February 13, 2005 . Retrieved May 13, 2008.

To Whom Should We Turn to Understand the Civil War?

John F. Marszalek, "The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River to Appomattox: Review," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine (April 1976) 59#2 pp 223-225. People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made. With funding and filming taking place in the late 1980s, “The Civil War” did reflect the time in which it was made. James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, and Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, a best-selling novel from 1974 about the Battle of Gettysburg, still exerted obvious influence. Both of these popular histories were focused almost solely on military history – battles, soldiers, and life on the warfront, and they seemingly guided the general focus of both the editing and production of “The Civil War.”

Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. A stunning book full of color, life, character and a new atmosphere of the Civil War, and at the same time a narrative of unflagging power. Eloquent proof that an historian should be a writer above all else.”—Burke Davis Though the events of this middle year of the Civil War have been recounted hundreds of times, they have rarely been re-created with such vigor and such picturesque detail.”— The New York Times Book Review I do not see how anyone who has experienced war could disagree with your observation, and I think the men of many regiments that fought at Gettysburg would have strongly disagreed with Mr. Russo’s statement that “a list of regiments not mentioned is meaningless.” Minimizing hundreds of years of uncompensated, brutalized slavery, omitting the abject failure of any type of reparations, and completely ignoring the racist violence following the end of the war, “The Civil War” ultimately allowed white Americans to distance themselves from current-day racism and the persistent (and worsening) racial wealth gap. It pardoned sinners who had never asked for pardon; it erased the sadistic violence of the era that still has yet to be fully exposed; it made it all, somehow, feel worth it.Foote edited The Pica, the student newspaper of Greenville High School, and frequently used the paper to lampoon the school's principal. In 1935, Foote applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hoping to join with the older Percy boys, but was initially denied admission because of an unfavorable recommendation from his high school principal. He presented himself for admission anyway, and as result of a round of admissions tests, he was accepted. [13] Rebecca Savransky, “Ken Burns Says One Factor Caused the Civil War: ‘Slavery’,” The Hill, October 31, 2017.

Historian John F. Marszalek reviewing volume 3 focused on the purely military history covered by Foote: Taken under the wing of a local lawyer, William Alexander Percy, Foote became a lifelong friend of Percy's cousin, Walker Percy, the future novelist. There are 315 letters from Foote to Percy now in the University of North Carolina library (a selection of their correspondence, edited by Jay Tolson, was published in 1998). Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads. A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature.Foote’s presence points to a larger problem with the documentary: its embrace of the Lost Cause. This mythology appears throughout all nine episodes, beginning minutes into the first. The war, the viewer learns, “began as a bitter dispute over union and state’s rights.” Missing from this statement is the fact that the southern states seceded over a very particular state’s right – the right to own slaves. The documentary also buys into the classic Lost Cause tenet that the Confederacy was doomed to fail from the outset of the Civil War, never standing a chance against the vast industrial might of the North, but fighting nobly to the end. Eric Foner, “Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion,” in Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 112. The Civil War: A Narrative, Tullahoma to Meridian: Riot and Resurgence. New York: Random House. 2005. ISBN 0-307-29028-X.

The Civil War: A Narrative, Tullahoma to Missionary Ridge (40th Anniversaryed.). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life. 1999. ISBN 0-7835-0107-2. a b Harrington, Evans, and Shelby Foote. "Interview With Shelby Foote." The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4, 1971, pp. 349–377, p. 359.Saint Louis Literary Award – Saint Louis University". Slu.edu. Archived from the original on August 23, 2016 . Retrieved July 16, 2018. Mississippi Writers Trail markers for Shelby Foote and Walker Percy unveiled in Greenville | Mississippi Development Authority". Mississippi.org . Retrieved June 16, 2020. Meacham, Jon, ed. (2011). American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative . New York: Random House. Foote did not hesitate to affirm that he would have fought for the south; when he used the term "southerner" he meant "white southerner". But he will be remembered with affection because he showed Americans why the civil war mattered, and matters still - and not just to southerners. In 2017, the conservative writer Bill Kauffman, writing in The American Conservative, argued for a revival of Foote's sympathetic portrayal of the South. [52]