Allen Guelzo writes the definite account of Gettysburg, 150 years after the iconic battle

NEW YORK, June 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- As the 150th anniversary of the landmark Battle of Gettysburg approaches, Civil War expert Allen Guelzo suggests that the battle was chock full of heroism, but not much professionalism. This, he says, is how most American wars have been fought. Guelzo addresses this and other insights in his New York Times best-selling new book, GETTYSBURG: The Last Invasion:

• The most egregious legend about the Battle of Gettysburg says that it happened accidentally when the two armies blundered into each other. Actually, Robert E. Lee had predicted several days before that a battle would likely be fought at Gettysburg.
• The Union army's commanding general at Gettysburg, George Gordon Meade, had a Confederate governor and general as a brother-in-law, and lost a nephew fighting for the Confederacy at the battle of Chancellorsville, two months before.
• The last Confederate charge at Gettysburg broke up on a farm owned by a free black man, Abraham Bryan, someone who wasn't, by Confederate standards, supposed to exist.
• Meade's failure to bag the Confederate army after the battle was so bitter a disappointment, it's one of the few moments on record when Lincoln broke down and cried.
• Many think new rifling technology made the Civil War the first modern battle, but it was actually the last of the Napoleonic battles, more like Crimea than WWI.
• The Union won largely because lesser-known commanders made key decisions on their own initiative; 56 Congressional Medals of Honor were awarded to Union soldiers at Gettysburg.
• The Army of Northern Virginia suffered something comparable to two sinkings of the Titanic, the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, ten repetitions of the Great Blizzard of 1888, and two Pearl Harbors. The Confederates at Gettysburg sustained two and a half times the losses taken by the Allied armies in Normandy from D-Day through August 1944.

Guelzo discusses GETTYSBURG on WNYCThe Leonard Lopate Show

Read a Q&A with Guelzo

Request a review copy or an interview with Guelzo:
Erica Hinsley / [email protected] / 212-572-2018

"Wonderful . . . Guelzo's book is an extremely timely reminder that the American experiment has not been, as the Founders asserted, a 'self-evident truth' but in fact a highly debatable proposition that needed to be proved, not just in July 1863 at Gettysburg but on many days and in many places since." —Wall Street Journal

SOURCE Alfred A. Knopf