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The Bonfire

The Siege and Burning of Atlanta

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Contributors

By Marc Wortman

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Jun 1, 2010
Page Count
464 pages
Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9781586488192

Price

$24.99

Price

$32.99 CAD

Format

  1. ebook

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $24.99 $32.99 CAD
  2. ebook $10.99 $13.99 CAD

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The destruction of Atlanta is an iconic moment in American history — it was the centerpiece of Gone with the Wind. But though the epic sieges of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Berlin have all been explored in bestselling books, the one great American example has been treated only cursorily in more general histories. Marc Wortman remedies that conspicuous absence in grand fashion with The Bonfire, an absorbing narrative history told through the points of view of key participants both Confederate and Union.

The Bonfire reveals an Atlanta of unexpected paradoxes: a new mercantile city dependent on the primitive institution of slavery; governed by a pro-Union mayor, James Calhoun, whose cousin was a famous defender of the South. When he surrendered the city to General Sherman after forty-four terrible days, Calhoun was accompanied by Bob Yancey, a black slave likely the son of Union advocate Daniel Webster. Atlanta was both the last of the medieval city sieges and the first modern urban devastation. From its ashes, a new South would arise.

Genre:

  • Nonfiction
  • History
  • United States
  • Civil War Period (1850-1877)

Marc Wortman is an award-winning freelance journalist and independent scholar. His articles and essays have appeared in many national magazines. He is the author of The Millionaires' Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power.

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Marc Wortman

About the Author

Marc Wortman, an independent historian and freelance journalist, has written for many publications, including Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, Time, Air & Space, and The Daily Beast and has appeared on CNN, NPR, C-SPAN BookTV, History Channel. He is the author of four books on American military and social history, most recently Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power (Yale University Press, 2022). He has taught at Princeton and Quinnipiac Universities and a college program at a maximum security prison. He was the recipient of a New York Public Library Research Fellowship and was the 2014 Jalonick Memorial Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Texas Dallas. Following college at Brown University, he received a doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University.

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