Jim Murphy Quotes

It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.

Occasionally, a re-enactment is a fine thing. I love Civil War re-enactments.

In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government.

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.

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.

I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

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.

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.

I'd done the method bit before from, like, age 15 to 19. I was a Civil War re-enactor.

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.

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

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.

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

In 2001, I moved from Philly to Atlanta, where I lived for six years. I had never lived anywhere but Philly, and you can imagine the culture shock; the Civil War seeps into daily life and conversation down South in a way it never does up North.

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