Victims

A True Story of the Civil War

De: Phillip Shaw Paludan

Narrado por: Marlin May

In January 1863, in a remote Appalachian valley of North Carolina called Shelton Laurel, thirteen prisoners ranging in age from thirteen to fifty-nine were shot to death. Soldiers recruited from the region, led by two officers from a nearby town, did the actual killing, but in all probability a general who would later be a friend and lieutenant of Robert E. Lee had given the orders that led to the murders. This book is the story of that atrocity.

At least 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Major battles numbered the dead in the thousands; even minor skirmishes killed hundreds. "What I deal in is too vast for malice," Lincoln said, and he was right. Then why study the death of thirteen men? There are several reasons. First, to do so is to encounter the killing, what Whitman called "the real war," at a level with human scale.

The book is published byThe University of Tennessee Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©1981 The University of Tennessee Press (P)2026 Redwood Audiobooks

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Phillip Paludan has combined the findings of the social sciences with an exercise in la petite histoire to create an intriguing study. From his base point, the massacre of thirteen Unionist mountaineers at Shelton Laurel, North Carolina, the author expands the investigation to embrace larger issues, such as the impact of the Civil War on small communities, the causation and characteristics of guerrilla warfare, and the focus underlying human perversity." (Civil War History)

". . . the definitive history of the Shelton Laurel Massacre, but more important it is a pathbreaking study of a principal theater of the guerrilla aspect of the Civil War. Paludan has succeeded admirably in rooting a historically neglected topic in the lives of ordinary people." (American Historical Review)

"The questions Paludan asks about Shelton Laurel in 1863 are appropriate to My Lai in 1968 and Auschwitz in 1944. Victims is not only a good book; it is also an important book. And it is a profoundly disturbing book." (Georgia Historical Quarterly)