Ordeal by Fire: Volume 1, The Coming of War - Softcover

Written by a leading Civil War historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, this text describes the social, economic, political, and ideological conflicts that led to a unique, tragic, and transitional event in American history. The third edition incorporates recent scholarship and addresses renewed areas of interest in the Civil War/Reconstruction era including the motivations and experiences of common soldiers and the role of women in the war effort.

James M. McPherson is George Henry Davis 86 Professor of American History at Princeton University where he has taught since 1962. He received his BA from Gustavus Adolphus College in 1958 and his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 1963. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Scaver Institute Fellow at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In 1999, McPherson received the Public Humanities Award of the New Jersey Council of the Humanities. A leading Civil War historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author, McPherson has written many books including most recently, What They Fought For, 1861-1865 (1994), Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (1996), For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), and Is Blood Thicker Than Water? Crises of Modern Nationalism (1998).