Allan Gurganus Quotes

Logan was talking about the Civil War, which claimed the lives of more than 500,000 Americans. He wanted to provide Civil War veterans with a day to pay respects to their fellow soldiers who did not live to see the end of the war, without losing a day's pay.

We will never know exactly how many women disguised themselves as men and fought in the Civil War. At the close of the hostilities, it was estimated that approximately 400 women had managed to enlist, but this number is almost certainly too low.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

Most historians agree that Abraham Lincoln was the most important man to ever occupy the White House because he abolished slavery and kept the states united through a bloody civil war.

I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they're convalescing in a Civil War hospital.

Sometimes we see the Civil War in movies and imagine these neatly aligned rows of men with muskets, walking in line to shoot each other. In reality the things that fascinated me were how absolutely ruthless and violent so many engagements were, how much suffering and how men were not prepared.

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

Something often neglected in popular accounts of the Wild West is the extent to which its dramas were colored by the politics and personal resentments left by the Civil War.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

Yes, the small village that we live in, in Virginia, is a very interesting place, in terms of its Civil War history, because it was a town that was founded by Quakers in 1733.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.

I grew up 60 minutes way from Richmond, in Charlottesville, Virginia and, as a child, I was obsessed with the Civil War. I used to do re-enactments and all that stuff.

And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.

We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

President Abraham Lincoln never lost his ardor for the United States to remain united during the Civil War.

Now that it's officially summer, here's my advice to parents who want to continue teaching their kids during the next two months and learn something themselves: visit Civil War battlefields.

The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.

In the beginning of the war, Southern women wanted their men to leave - in droves, and as quickly as possible. They were the Confederate Army's most persuasive and effective recruitment officers, shaming anyone who shirked his duty to fight.