From the acclaimed Civil War historian, and coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the legendary battle: a brilliant new history—the most intimate and richly readable account we have had—that draws the reader into the muck and grime of Gettysburg alongside the ordinary soldier, and depicts, as never before, the combination of personalities and circumstances that produced one of the great battles of all time.

Though the Battle of Gettysburg has been written about at length and thoroughly dissected in terms of strategic importance, never before has a book dived down so closely to the individual soldier to explore the experience of the three days of intense fighting for the people involved, or looked so closely at the way politics swayed military decisions, or placed the battle in the context of nineteenth-century military practice. Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett's Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny the cornerstone battle of the Civil War is given extraordinarily vivid new life.