James M. McPherson

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Articles by this Author

President Lincoln's Disastrous First Month, Spring 2020 | Vol. 65, No. 2

Only hours after being sworn in, Lincoln faced the most momentous decision in presidential history.

Why the Civil War Still Matters, Spring 2011 | Vol. 61, No. 1

America's leading authority on the conflict explains why the Civil War still fascinates us.

Showdown at Sumter, Winter 2010 | Vol. 59, No. 4

Only hours after being sworn in, Lincoln faced the most momentous decision in presidential history.

Lincoln As Commander in Chief, Winter 2009 | Vol. 58, No. 6

Even though he had no military training, Lincoln quickly rose to become one of America’s most talented commanders.

The Test of Reconciliation in Terrible Times, November/December 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 8

The events of 9/11 were horrific, almost beyond comprehension. But when our nation was sorely tried before, it emerged stronger and better than before.

Gettysburg, 1862, September 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 5

A LEADING CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN CHANGES ONE SMALL HAPPENSTANCE—WHICH IN TURN CHANGES EVERYTHING

A War That Never Goes Away, March 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 2

More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861.

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Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.