The Fourth Battle of Winchester

the long version

"Students of the Civil War tend to focus attention on the great campaigns and battles that took place in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, a practice that Richard M. McMurry contends has distorted many facets of the war. The July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, for example, came to be widely - if erroneously - regarded as the "decisive battle" and the "turning point" of the war as well as the "high tide" of the Confederacy. In The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm, McMurry, using a "counter-factual" account of the 1864 campaigns in Virginia, presents a view of the Civil War from the West - moving from the narrow confines of the Old Dominion to the vast Trans-Appalachian region - and gives the reader a new and far more complete understanding of why and how the war ended in a Union victory and of the roles played by several of the conflict's major actors."--BOOK JACKET.