"Your horrid war troubles anger me sometimes," the English social critic John Ruskin wrote a friend in the United State in 1862. "The road of it seems to clang in the blue sky. You poor mad things what will become of you?"
The story of what became of us during that conflict unfolds in the pages of The Civil War. From the decades before the clash when the issues that divided the country outlived every attempt at compromise through the opening gunshot, to the somber field at Appomattox where men wearily laid down their arms and went home, this boof chronicles the actions and passions of a people caugth in the grip of history.