A Single Grand Victory is a highly readable, concise, comprehensive narrative of the first major battle of the Civil War. Rafuse served as park historien at Bull Run, where he gained great familiarity with the site and the literature on this battle. His book incorporates insights offered in recent scholarship on Civil War military, political, and cultural history. The author describes the factors that led President Abraham Lincoln to order an offensive against Confederates at Manassas Junction at a time when his most prominent military men advised against it. The war policies of both the...

Even though he defeated Robert E. Lee in the Civil War's greatest battle, George Gordon Meade has never enjoyed a prominent place in the pantheon of Union war heroes. To most students of the Civil War, he is merely the man who was lucky enough to benefit from Confederate mistakes at Gettysburg, but whose shortcomings as a commander compelled Abraham Lincoln to bring in Ulysses S. Grant from the West to achieve victory.
In this, the first book-length study of the general to appear in a generation, Ethan S. Rafuse challenges the notion that Meade was simply the last in a long line of...

The outcomes of campaigns in the Civil War often depended on top generals having the right corps commanders in the right place at the right time. Mutual trust and respect between generals and their corps commanders, though vital to military success, was all too rare: Corps commanders were often forced to exercise considerable discretion in the execution of orders from their generals, and bitter public arguments over commanders' performances in battle followed hard on the heels of many major engagements. Controversies that arose during the war around the decisions of corps and army...