Author Description

The Civil War left an indelible stamp on the American landscape. It turned Fort Sumter —originally intended to defend Charleston harbor— into that city's enemy territory; it transformed the peach orchards and wheatfields at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, into killing fields, commemorated by President Lincoln' Gettysburg Address; it turned Wilmer McLean's parlor at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, into a diplomatic meeting room where generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee negotiated terms of surrender; it converted Washington, D.C.'s Old Patent Office into a makeshift hospital where Clara Barton and other nurses tended to the wounded, and Tannehill Furnace from an iron-producing forge to an artillery furnace. And most permanently, it transformed General Robert E. Lee's magnificent Virginia plantation into Arlington National Cemetery, a final resting place for thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers. Each site in *Landmarks of the Civil War* explores an aspect of the war —be it military, political, economic, or social— by way of such historic place. Author Nina Silber takes readers on a series of field trips to the sites where the Union was preserved and where the cost of that ideal resonates to this day.