Life and Military Career of Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman

Phineas Camp HeadleyProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
489K words
Chapters
49

Tags

English Originals Political and Military LeadersMilitary Civil WarMilitary StrategyLeadershipMilitary BiographyCommander PortrayalHeroismCampaign NarrativeAmerican History

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Life and Military Career of Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman by P. C. HeadleyAuthor: Headley, P. C. (Phineas Camp), 1819-1903,Language: English, Class: E456: History: America: Civil War period (1861-1865), Release Date: May 5, 2016

Editor's review

This is a biography of General Sherman published in the late nineteenth century. Headley was known for writing military biographies for a general audience in an accessible, fluent narrative style. The book follows Sherman's military career from his early years through the Western Theater of the Civil War, with fairly detailed descriptions of marches, battlefield decisions, and army life, giving readers a quick overall picture of the war in the West. Its strength is readability and clear structure, making it a good introductory work on Sherman; its limitations are equally clear: written early, it carries pronounced period biases and a heroizing tone, offers little reflection on controversial issues, and cites sources loosely. Today it is best read as an old biography of historical value rather than as an objective final word. Read alongside modern studies on the same subject, you can appreciate both the narrative appeal of nineteenth-century biography and see how ideas about writing history have changed.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents first to identify key chapters on the Western Theater, then go back to the early-life sections.
  2. Mark march routes on a map as you read; matching people to geography makes understanding much smoother.
  3. After each stage, check a modern encyclopedia entry or research overview to compare the old biography's narrative tendencies.
  4. Note the author's evaluative language about individuals and excerpt it separately; this reveals traces of period bias.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49

FAQ

Is the book's narrative stance objective? Not really. Written in the late nineteenth century, it has a pronounced heroizing tone and period bias, presenting its subject mostly positively and offering little reflection on controversies. It is better treated as material on how people of the time viewed Sherman; to form your own judgment, read it alongside modern scholarship.
Can I read it without background in the American Civil War? Yes, but first spend a little time learning the war's timeline and main theaters, especially the geography of the Western Theater. The book contains many battle place names and unit numbers, and without background you can easily get lost; with a basic framework, the narrative itself is accessible and coherent, so it is not hard to get into.
Is it better for research or for casual reading? Both, but with different emphases. For casual reading, simply follow the narrative and enjoy the storytelling rhythm of nineteenth-century biography; for research, note its loose citations and obvious evaluative bias, and use it as supplementary material alongside archives or modern academic works.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Phineas Camp Headley Author · American · 1819–1903

Phineas Camp Headley (1819–1903) was an American minister and biographer known for writing popular biographies for young readers. Two of his works are held in this collection: Life and Military Career of Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman, which recounts the life of the famous American Civil War general, and Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2, a religious and historical-geographical reader. Headley was skilled at adapting real figures and historical events into narratives accessible to young people, using plain and lively prose and emphasizing readability over scholarly depth. His biographical works are representative of nineteenth-century American popular reading and helped introduce historical figures to younger audiences. Beyond these two works, public information on his life is limited.