Pickett’s Charge, the assault on the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge ordered by Robert E. Lee on 3 July 1863, the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, holds a central place in the nation’s collective memory of the Civil War. Available for the first time as an Omnibus E-book Edition, this two-volume set provides readers with an integrated view of the Charge, from the battlefield to the American imagination. The Omnibus comprises Earl J. Hess’s Pickett’s Charge: The Last Attack at Gettysburg, a detailed and authoritative account of the Charge itself, and Carol Reardon’s Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory, which provides the rest of the story: how, and why, Pickett’s Charge became so singularly important to our national memory of the Civil War.
In Pickett’s Charge: The Last Attack at Gettysburg, Hess offers the definitive history of the most famous military action of the Civil War. He transforms exhaustive research into a moving narrative account of the assault from both Union and Confederate perspectives, analyzing its planning, execution, aftermath, and legacy. most famous military action of the Civil War. He transforms exhaustive research into a moving narrative account of the assault from both Union and Confederate perspectives, analyzing its planning, execution, aftermath, and legacy.
In Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory, Reardon examines the events of 3 July 1863 through the selective and evocative lens of 'memory' and reveals that we can learn much about why it endures so strongly in the American imagination. Over the years, soldiers, journalists, veterans, politicians, orators, artists, poets, and educators, Northerners and Southerners alike, shaped, revised, and even sacrificed the 'history' of the charge to create 'memories' that met ever-shifting needs and deeply felt values. Reardon shows that the story told today of Pickett’s Charge is really an amalgam of history and memory. The evolution of that mix, she concludes, tells us much about how we come to understand our nation’s past.
Earl J. Hess is Stewart W. McClelland Chair in history at Lincoln Memorial University and has written many books on Civil War history, including The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat and Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign.
Carol Reardon is George Winfree Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University and author of Launch the Intruders: A Naval Attack Squadron in the Vietnam War, 1972, and With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North, among other books.
