Brian Matthew Jordan's Marching Home, a ?powerful exploration? (Washington Post) of the fates of Union veterans, vaulted him into the first rank of Civil War historians. Now, in A Thousand May Fall, Jordan sends us trundling along dusty roads with the 107th Ohio, an ethnically German infantry regiment whose members battled nativism no less than Confederate rebels.
The 107th was at once ordinary and exceptional: its ranks played central roles in two of the war's pivotal battles, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, even as language, identity, and popular perceptions of their loyalties set them apart. Drawing on many never-before-used sources, Jordan shows how, while enduring the horrible extremes of war, the men of the 107th Ohio contemplated the deeper meanings of the conflict?from personal questions of citizenship to the overriding matter of emancipation. A pioneering account from the view of the ordinary, immigrant soldier?200,000 native Germans fought for the Union, in total?A Thousand May Fall overturns many of our most basic assumptions about the bloodiest conflict in our history.
