Remembering Civil War Historian Shelby Foote

A Compilation Of Sayings Of Shelby Foote  (1916 – 2005)

Foote was relatively unknown to the general public for most of his life until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was “central to all our lives.”

"It is very necessary if you’re going to understand the American character in the 20th Century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe in the mid-19th Century. It was the crossroads of our being and it was a hell of a crossroads".

Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a massive, three-volume history of the war.

From The Civil War Parlor on Tumblr