Landmarks of the Civil War

The Civil War left an indelible stamp on the American landscape. It turned Fort Sumter —originally intended to defend Charleston harbor— into that city's enemy territory; it transformed the peach orchards and wheatfields at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, into killing fields, commemorated by President Lincoln' Gettysburg Address; it turned Wilmer McLean's parlor at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, into a diplomatic meeting room where generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee negotiated terms of surrender; it converted Washington, D.C.'s Old Patent Office into a makeshift hospital where Clara Barton and other nurses tended to the wounded, and Tannehill Furnace from an iron-producing forge to an artillery furnace. And most permanently, it transformed General Robert E. Lee's magnificent Virginia plantation into Arlington National Cemetery, a final resting place for thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers. Each site in *Landmarks of the Civil War* explores an aspect of the war —be it military, political, economic, or social— by way of such historic place. Author Nina Silber takes readers on a series of field trips to the sites where the Union was preserved and where the cost of that ideal resonates to this day.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.