Well written and engaging, This Great Struggle is a superb introduction to the event that forged modern America.

Mark Grimsley, author of The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865

Steve Woodworth, perhaps the most prolific and versatile Civil War historian working today, has taken on a big subject—the entire war. His This Great Struggle is a smoothly written, highly readable and insightful retelling of the full story, full of twists of cogent insight that make it a different, much welcomed synthesis of that brutal passage in our history. Hitting all the necessary stops, he has crafted a masterful tapestry.

John C. Waugh

Woodworth, author of, most recently, Manifest Destinies (2010), recounts the entire Civil War surveystyle, from causes to aftermath. Necessarily presenting matters at a high level of generality, he introduces major events and historians’ debates to his intended audience of readers newly acquainting themselves with the conflict, who may be surprised that positing slavery as the fundamental cause of the war is occasionally disputed by scholars who magnify the tariff or states’ rights. Militarily, the Battle of Gettysburg lodges in the popular mind as the war’s most decisive. Woodworth dispatches such misconceptions en route to summarizing the major campaigns of the war (those in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia were the critical ones), as well as maintaining front and center the war’s ever-present political contexts in the North and the South. Still, it is the battlefield drama and the qualities of commanders that fascinate buffs, whose expectations Woodworth cultivates with his precise delineation of military action and lapidary portraits of generals directing it well or badly in this fine gateway to the vast Civil War bibliography.

Booklist

Woodworth, of Texas Christian University, enhances his position in the front rank of Civil War scholars. He makes a strong case for three controversial points. First, the Civil War was about slavery. The fundamental dispute over the 'peculiar institution' had continually defied peaceful resolution; state’s rights, tariffs, all the other wedge issues were structured by slavery; and from the war’s beginning both sides knew why they were really fighting. Second, Woodworth establishes the war’s crucial sector as between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The eastern theater rapidly stalemated; only in the west was there space to sustain the large-scale maneuver war that gave full scope to the Union’s industrial superiority and to developed generals like Grant and Sherman. Third, Woodworth demonstrates that while the Union’s conventional victory was 'clear and overwhelming,' Reconstruction was an unconventional phase of the war—'not quite open war but not quite peace'—in which the advantage rested with the vanquished South. A desperate commitment to sustaining white supremacy outlasted the North’s will to complete the transformation of American society. This is a well-crafted, comprehensively researched overview of America’s central conflict.

Publishers Weekly

[Woodworth] shows clearly how the war in the West—Grant’s and Sherman’s war—was the decisive factor, rather than the stalemate in the East. He also demonstrates how the South’s unrelenting campaign to maintain white supremacy—the felicitous phrase is 'not quite open war, but not quite peace'—outlasted a tired North’s determination to fully end the realities of slavery.

Star Ledger

Thorough.

Cedar Rapids Gazette