A World on Fire: The Epic History of the British in the American Civil War. by Amanda Foreman - Hardcover

Foreman, Amanda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846142040 ISBN 13: 9781846142048

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2010

Synopsis

In "A World on Fire" Amanda Foreman brings her unique style of epic biography to the American Civil War. During the titanic struggle between North and South, both sides demanded Britain's support. British volunteers fought on both sides; British guns and bullets littered the battlefields. The South depended on British-built cruisers to make up its navy, and British blockade runners to supply its armies. This book portrays the extraordinary web of relationships between the two countries through the lives of over a hundred participants - soldiers, mercenaries, politicians, spies, journalists, diplomats, doctors and nurses who, at home or abroad, recorded their experience of the war. It traces the often desperate efforts of men and women to survive, to preserve the ideals and ways of living they believed were right, and even, sometimes, to find love in the worst of circumstances. "A World On Fire" is history told in the round, combining the human intensity of battle with the manoeuvrings of fraught diplomacy. We see the letters of soldiers fighting thousands of miles from their homeland; the passionate dispatches from diplomats and journalists; and the diaries of the brave women who laboured in some cases to save a single life, and in others to protect an entire way of life. This is a new and dramatic account of the first modern war and of Britain's part in it, for good or ill.

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Photographs from A World on Fire
Click on the photos below to enlarge.

The trenches at Petersberg, Virginia, 1865	Confederate President Jefferson Davis, 1808-1889	Victory Parade of the U.S. Army, Washington, D.C. May 24, 1865	Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 2nd Lord Lyons 1817-1887

About the Author:

Amanda Foreman is the author of the international bestseller Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1999) which has been translated into thirteen languages and won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. The book inspired a documentary, a radio play starring Dame Judi Dench, and a film, The Duchess, released in 2008, starring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes. She is currently a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is married with five children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1846142040
• ISBN 13: 9781846142048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1040