Shell shock, battle fatigue, posttraumatic stress disorder, lack of moral courage: different terms for the same mental condition, formal names that change with observed circumstances and whenever experts feel prompted to coin a more suitable descriptive term for the shredding of the human spirit. Although the specter of psychological dysfunction has marched alongside all soldiers in all wars, always at the ready to ravish minds, rarely is it discussed when the topic is America s greatest conflict, the Civil War. Yet mind-destroying terror was as present at Gettysburg and Antietam as in...

Secession is no longer your ancestor's concept. Demagogues with a yearning to carve the United States into fragments are at work today. Thomas J. DiLorenzo's prolific work attacking the memory of Abraham Lincoln has made him the titular head of a modern I-hate-America separatist movement. Armed with a long and varied list of sources, this third of Dennis W. Brandt's books launches a full-frontal assault on DiLorenzo's lines and point by historical point dissects his Lincolnphobic falsehoods. Readable, factual, and provocative, Brandt conceived Shattering the Truth as a one-stop antidote to...