A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army [Hardcover]

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a pathbreaking history of the CivilWar centered on a regiment of immigrants and their brutal experience ofthe conflict. Jordan has constructed a humanistic history of how ordinary men became soldiers under extraordinary circumstances none could have foreseen . . . In giving the men of the 107th their hard-earned place in history, Jordan has set a high bar for future historians to meet and a template for exceptional historians to follow. Jordan's talent for vivid narrative rivals John Keegan's . . . The story of the 107th Ohio is not one of adventure, brave charges, and celebrations. But this is what makes it a welcome and essential contribution to the scholarship on the common soldier . . . The true strength of his book is its evocation of the dizzyingly complex experience of the men who fought to preserve the Union. Historian Jordan ( The personal sacrifice of soldiers in war often gets lost in military histories, and Jordan's moving account of the 107th Ohio is a welcome corrective. Movingly, [Jordan] writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets and remembered their fallen brothers in arms. A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history. Like many other regiments in the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the 107th Ohio was composed mostly of German-Americans and shared the Corps unhappy role as scapegoat for the armys defeat at Chancellorsville and the first day at Gettysburg. This stigma shaped much of the regiments experience, which was otherwise typical of Civil War soldiering. In this splendid regimental history, Brian Matthew Jordan gives color and texture to that hard-knock experience. Prodigiously researched and elegantly crafted, Brian Matthew JordansUS