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Podcast: New Books in Military History
Episode: Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)
Description: More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?
That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write th...