Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for Tuesday, May 31st. I am here with David Plotz, Slate's editor, the Assembly Bazelon talking. And we are very excited today to have a special guest, Yale historian David Blight, who is a super Civil War expert and is going to

help us talk about the book Killer Angels by Michael Shara. This is a book that was published in

1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize, but really became a big hit 20 years later when the movie Gettysburg was made based on this book.

And it has since then sold more than 2.5 million copies.

It's really become a classic of the Civil War.

And since, as everyone knows, this is the sesquitennial of the war.

And we also thought particularly appropriate for Memorial Day.

Is that sesquicentennial? Oh yeah. Hmm. Cesquicentennial? Sorry.

Cesquicentennial. All right, David Flaas, and you're such a know-in-all today. Tell us a little bit

about how the book is laid out because that's one of its most distinctive features. Okay. No, I'm not going to do that first. First, I have to do a little bit about how the book is laid out because that's one of its most distinctive features.

Okay, no, I'm not going to do that first. First, I have to do a little fanboy, welcome to David Blight.

It's like being on a podcast with Bruce Springsteen for me. The greatest pleasure I've had in the last six months was listening to your Civil War and Reconstruction class, which is available on iTunes University, which I cannot recommend highly enough to people listening to this before you go out and read The Killer Angels, or if you've already read it, go and download David Blight's class, listen to it. It's amazing. I'm sort of nervous. I'm sweating just being on the same podcast with you. If you were in the room, I can't even imagine what I would be doing. That's right. It's a good thing. I'd be kneeling at your feet, probably. So thank you for joining us. Well, thank you very much, but I'm feeling bad for you. I'm not sure what else you've been doing the last six months. I'm a little worried. I read grants memoirs. And then after I read his memoirs, I thought, you know, goodness, I'd love to learn some more about the Civil War. Grant was an amazing writer, wasn't he? Well, we'll talk about that a little bit. Okay, so enough of my slavish and embarrassing introductions. Yes. So the structure of the killer angels, it's the story of the three days of the battle with Gettysburg, and it's told from inside the head of about, I didn't count, about a dozen different generals and colonels on both sides.

Obviously, General Lee, General Longstreet, who's General Lee's deputy, the two leading Confederate commanders as well as various other

Confederate generals, and from several Union generals who I guess are somewhat less well known.

And notably, I think that my favorite character and probably everyone's favorite character

is the Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, who is a colonel who played a critical

role in the Battle of Little Roundtop. And we are in their heads as they experience the

Battle of Gettysburg over these three days in July 1863. So David Blight, one question I have about

this book is it has made Gettysburg seem incredibly central to the war. And so I wonder if that's

true, if the book has made us over-emphasize the Civil War and if there are other ways in which it's

really affected our perceptions of Civil War history. Well, Gettysburg was extremely important.

As a turning point in the war, it repulses Lee's second invasion

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