If you ever watched Ken Burn’s masterful, if flawed, documentary Civil War you no doubt remember the many quotes from George Templeton Strong voiced by George Plimpton. With his aristocratic high society New York accent he made trenchant comments on Lincoln, the Irish, and the ups and downs of the Union forces in the field. Now, the Library of America has a new collection of Strong’s Civil War diaries that has just been published. To mark it, the Library of America has released a video of the editor of the new book Geoff Wisner and historian Brenda Wineapple discussing George Templeton Strong and his diaries, how this differs from an earlier publication in the 1950s by Allan Nevins, and how it impacts on Civil War scholarship. Below is an unedited recording of the original presentation.
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