That’s how I treat history: it’s often been said that the past is a foreign country, and I try to be a foreign correspondent in the land of the past. When I was a full-time journalist, I would be assigned by an editor to go to a foreign country and send back a magazine piece about it. Goodheart: My background is one that combines academia with journalism.

I wanted to recapture some of the complexity of actual human experience.Ĭhapter 16: How did you find the stories you wanted to tell? All too often the depictions of war in either popular history or academia have been much too reductive. Wars, civil wars especially, have a gravitational pull of their own, drawing in many people for many reasons. That’s what I try to capture in the book-a pointillist image of that moment, that crisis. Goodheart: All of us know from our own times that history isn’t something that happens because of one speech that’s made or one law that’s passed, but that it’s an accumulation of individual moments and individual decisions and individual dilemmas for millions of people. Your book does a great job bringing that story to life. The Civil War is often framed as either inevitable or the result of political mistakes, in either case without any connection to the lives of everyday people.

Should he stay loyal to the country whose flag he had fought under for decades, or should he stay loyal to the South, since he considered himself a Southerner, being from Maryland? Those letters brought me into that moment and into the dilemma that man faced, and I decided I wanted to tell a story of a big moment in history through a series of small, individual stories.Ĭhapter 16: That’s what is so moving about the book. He was stationed out in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, and he was trying to decide what to do as the country went to pieces. Army in 1861, as the country was falling apart. The letters documented the dilemmas faced by a man who was serving as an officer in the U.S. He spoke with Chapter 16 by phone prior to his forthcoming appearance at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville.Ĭhapter 16: Once you decided to write about the Civil War, how did you settle on the idea of writing about a particular year-and why 1861?Īdam Goodheart: The genesis of the book was in a bundle of letters that I found in the attic of an old plantation house here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I live. Through a series of profiles and stories, Goodheart demonstrates how America was both gearing up for an epic conflict and coming to grips with the horror that lay before it-and all the while slowly realizing that whatever happened, it would change the nation forever. In his book 1861: The Civil War Awakening, historian and journalist Adam Goodheart presents what he calls a “pointillist” picture of a country on the brink of self-destruction.

1861 by adam goodheart