Uncle Daniel's Story of Tom Anderson, and Twenty Great Battles

McElroy, John, 1846-1929Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.6
Word count
831K words
Chapters
84

Tags

English Originals War and Military Fiction Military CommandersVeteran MemoirHeroismPatriotismFamily TaleWar NarrativeDocumentary NarrativeTurbulent Era

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. Uncle Daniel's Story Of "Tom" Anderson, and Twenty Great Battles by John McElroy. Author: McElroy, John, 1846-1929. Language: English. Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature. Release Date: Mar 25, 2010

Editor's review

Written by the American author and Civil War veteran John McElroy (1846–1929), this book adopts the voice of "Uncle Daniel telling a story" to recount the figure "Tom" Anderson and his experiences in twenty great battles. The work belongs to American and Canadian literature (Class PS) and bears clear marks of oral narration and veteran reminiscence, embedding personal experience within scenes of war. Its value for readers lies in its narrative perspective: rather than a macro survey in the manner of campaign history, it links battles through the voice of a character, in a colloquial style with a strong sense of scene. It is suited to readers interested in the literary appeal and forms of popular memory in nineteenth-century American war narrative. As a public-domain eBook from Project Gutenberg, the text is easy to obtain, but readers should note that its background and standpoint carry the limitations of its era and should read critically where depictions of war are concerned. It is suitable as supplementary reading for those interested in Civil War literature and oral-history narrative, not as a rigorous work of military history.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the opening passage that establishes the narrator and his relationship to "Tom" to grasp the narrative frame
  2. Read the twenty battles as separate units in several sittings to avoid confusion over character threads
  3. Note the narrator's standpoint and period prejudices while reading, making brief annotations
  4. Read alongside a basic Civil War chronology to help situate each battle

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

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FAQ

Is this book a rigorous military history of the American Civil War? No. It is closer to veteran narrative literature that recounts battles through the voice of a character, emphasizing scene and the feel of telling rather than source-based verification such as battle deployments and troop figures. For military history research, treat it as supplementary narrative material and compare it with professional historical works.
Why is "Tom" in quotation marks in the title? The quotation marks signal that "Tom" is a form of address or a character designation in the telling, not a strictly formal full name. Readers may understand it as the figure in Uncle Daniel's account who experiences many battles; the specific identity should be understood in light of the main narrative and should not be treated directly as an index of a historical person.
Is the original English edition difficult to read? Overall it is colloquial narrative with not especially difficult sentence structures, but nineteenth-century usage, place names, and military designations may create obstacles. Readers with some English foundation who are willing to look up words can attempt it; beginners are advised to read Chinese background material first before going into the original text.

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About the author

McElroy, John, 1846-1929 Author

John McElroy (McElroy, John, 1846–1929) was an author known chiefly for works on the American Civil War. Public information about him is limited, and many details of his life cannot be verified. The library holds 17 of his works, the more representative including Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons and its Volumes 1 to 4, as well as The Struggle for Missouri and Books 1 and 2 of the Si Klegg series. These works draw mainly on Civil War military prisons, regional campaigns, and soldiers' lives, with narratives that lean toward firsthand observation and documentary accounts and carry a strong flavor of historical recollection. The Andersonville material is substantial and presented in several volumes, offering source value for understanding the conditions of prisoners of war at the time, while The Struggle for Missouri focuses on the regional contest during the Civil War. Overall, his writings preserve part of the historical memory of the Civil War era in a documentary style and are suitable for readers interested in that period.