The Union War by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press, 2011), 256 pages, $28. Nearly every Southerner was raised studying the Civil War, or, as some here call it, the War Between the States. By the time I entered the public school system in Marietta, Georgia,...
Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace by Dominic Lieven. New York: Viking (2010), 656 pages. Historians face a challenge in finding something new and important in a familiar story. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 offers a case...
The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff. Random House (New York) 264 pp., 2008 Reviewed by John P. Rossi Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were two of the twentieth century’s greatest masters of English prose: Waugh in his comic...
Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War by Harry S. Stout. Viking Penguin (New York) 576 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2006 Harry Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, has written another...
A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century by John Burrow Random House (New York) 540 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2007 The past may be another country, as a cliché holds, but it nonetheless remains...
And I Will Go to the Altar of God
Jesse Russell reviews "On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular" by Jonathan Sheehan. @PrincetonUPress
