Gettysburg is a book about values - the values of the Civil War generation and those we live by today. Theirs was a generation willing to die in great numbers for a principle as abstract as union. What motivated them? What have we done with the heritage that they bequeathed to us? This book asks whether America in the 1990s knows what its present character, economics, and society cost, and whether the country's present battles have as noble a purpose and as hopeful a prospect as the great cataclysm of July 1863 - the Battle of Gettysburg. Walt Whitman perhaps said it best: ""Will the America of the future - will this vast, rich Union ever realize what itself cost back there, after all?"" This is, in effect, the story of two battlefields: Gettysburg during July 1863 and Gettysburg during the 1990s. Following Thoreau's dictum that ""it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is, "" the author has searched for contemporary America among the famous places of Gettysburg's historic landscape: McPherson's Woods and the Seminary, where the Iron Brigade made its decisive last stand and defined the economics of glory; the town itself, now a monument to the grim struggle of the past and the commercialism of the present; Cemetery Hill, where German gunners defended their pieces with rammers, water buckets, and unintelligible oaths; Seminary Ridge, where a young division commander pondered the meaning of the war and the will of God; Little Round Top, where the 15th Alabama nearly accomplished the humanly impossible; the Peach Orchard, where determination and heroism saved a day that, in the words of Bruce Catton, ""needed a lot of saving""; the wheat field, where a Yankeecolonel got a deathly glimpse of his future; the field of Pickett's Charge, where Lee's chief lieutenant first had to fight out his own lonely battle, and where a doomed and disgraced general then fought and won his battle with history and honor; and finally the battlefield after July

Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values

History

Gramm, Kent

Americas

Indiana University Press

While some religious texts may remain static over time, the Ramayana epic has been retold in a variety of ways over the centuries and across South Asia. Some of the narrative's most probing and innovative retellings have appeared in print in the last 100 years in the region of South India. This collection brings together, for the first time, modern retellings translated from the four major South Indian languages and from genres as diverse as drama, short stories, poetry, and folk song. The selections focus on characters generally seen as stigmatized or marginalized, and on themes largely overlooked in previous scholarship. Editor Paula Richman demonstrates that twentieth-century authors have used retellings of the Ramayana to question caste and gender inequality in provocative ways. This engaging anthology includes translations of 22 primary texts along with interpretive essays that provide background and frameworks for understanding the stories.

November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

It begins with the search for hallowed ground, the exact place from which Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. In bleak November, Kent Gramm makes a pilgrimage to the most famous battleground in American history and over the course of a month transforms his search into a discovery of the meaning of Lincoln’s elegy for America’s identity. For Gramm, the century that began with Lincoln’s address and ended with the assassinations of the 1960s saw the destruction of the 'modern' world and with it America’s sense of purpose. The book reflects on the November anniversaries of public events such as the Armistice that ended World War One, Kristallnacht, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of C. S. Lewis, the first major battle of the Vietnam War, and the publication of Robert F. Kennedy’s To Seek a Newer World, and also on private events in Gramm’s family history, provide the occasions for Gramm’s meditations on public and private heroism, on modernism’s hopes and postmodern despair. In November, he asks us to seek a path toward the 'new birth of freedom' that Lincoln envisioned at Gettysburg.
"The month begins with things that perish. But ultimately, November is a journey of hope, as was Lincoln’s journey to Gettysburg. So too I will journey to Gettysburg in these pages. Like Lincoln’s fellow citizens, I go there to assuage personal grief, to find answers; and I hope, for me as for them, that my personal sorrows become a vehicle for larger answers and a larger purpose. Lincoln addressed their grief, why not mine; he gave his generation purpose, why not ours."

In his latest book, Kent Gramm examines the meaning of the Civil War experience in our lives and explores philosophical and personal aspects of the War that lie outside the scope of traditional historical study. He probes the meaning of Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Antietam; the lives of U. S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, O. O. Howard, and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce; and the legacy of the unknown participant, "somebody’s darling," for whom the war would come to encompass all things. The Iron Brigade appears, along with its 20th-century successor, the 32nd "Red Arrow" Division. Readers of Gramm’s previous books will not be surprised to find essays that touch on Walt Whitman, John Keats, Henrik Ibsen, and Halldor Laxness, as well as such literary and religious works as the Iliad and the Bhagavad Gita. Gramm also treats more popular fare, such as the movie Gettysburg and a series of books on the ghosts of Gettysburg. In each of his subjects, Gramm finds the deep, personal significance of the profoundly universal experience of the war, as he ponders the special meaning of the Civil War in the lives of many Americans.

Somebody's Darling: Essays on the Civil War

In Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead, writer Kent Gramm and photographer Chris Heisey tell the famous battle’s story through the eyes of those who lived and died there. Unlike histories that simply recount the three furious days in July 1863, this book transports readers onto the battlefield and into the event’s historical echoes, making for a delightful, immersive experience. Creative nonfiction, fiction, dramatic dialogue, and poetry combine with full-color photographs to convey the essential reality of the famous battlefield as a place both terrible and beautiful. The living and the dead contained here include Confederates and Yankees, soldiers and civilians, male and female, young and old. Visitors to the battlefield after 1863, both well known and obscure, provide the voices of the living. They include a female admiral in the U.S. Navy and a man from rural Virginia who visits the battlefield as a way of working through the death of his son in Iraq. The ghostly voices of the dead include actual participants in the battle, like a fiery colonel and a girl in Confederate uniform, as well as their representatives, such as a grieving widow who has come to seek her husband. Utilizing light as a central motif and fourscore and seven voices to evoke how Gettysburg continues to draw visitors and resound throughout history, alternately wounding and stitching the lives it touches, Gramm’s words and Heisey’s photographs meld for a historical experience unlike any other. Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead offers a panoramic view wherein the battle and battlefield of Gettysburg are seen through the eyes of those who lived through it and died on it as well as those who have sought meaning at the site ever since.

Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Southern Illinois University Press

This ambitious Civil War novel centers on the moral dimension of the conflict as it traces a young Mississippi boy's conversion from pro-slavery Southerner to abolitionist Union soldier.Allan Montague, born on a Mississippi plantation about twenty years before the Civil War, has grown up with slavery and considers it natural. When his father moves to Boston for business and takes the boy with him, young Allan carries a knife given to him by his cousin to use in killing abolitionists.The first abolitionist young Allan meets in Boston is Levi Coffin, the reputed founder of the Underground Railroad. In this first of many meetings with historical figures, Allan forms a friendship with Coffin, who eventually takes him to hear a speech by former slave Frederick Douglass. Douglass's powerful words cement Allan's transformation into an abolitionist--a transformation that will lead him back to his Deep South home with the hope of freeing slaves and eventually back to the North and the fateful Battle of Manassas.Kent Gramm, author of the introduction for this new edition of Manassas, calls the novel "a modern version of the morality play," with the United States as the central character. "The real story," he writes, "is the moral phenomenon of the Civil War." It is a powerful book that deserves to be revived, read, and studied.  

Manassas: A Novel of the War (Classics of Civil War Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

SINCLAIR, UPTON

United States

University Alabama Press

Clare

Reference

Harold Shaw Pub.

Psalms for the Poor

Psalms for the Poor talk back to the blunt and beautiful phrases of the King James Bible. Sometimes personal, sometimes political, the original Psalms complain, question, curse, and adore: "Why do the wicked prosper?" "When I consider the moon and the stars", "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" "The Lord is my shepherd", "But I am poor and needy". Luther's last words were, "We are beggars". These poems are for the world's poor, and for the pauper in each of us.

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Resource Publications

Sharpsburg: A Civil War Narrative

The Civil War, sometimes called "The American Iliad" is an epic of violence, rage, bravery, and love, whose echoes still can be heard. America's bloodiest day was September 17, 1862--the Battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg, which enabled President Lincoln to issue a proclamation freeing all slaves in the rebellious states. The battle's story is told here by two soldiers: a Yankee, who fights for union, justice, and equality; and a Rebel, for whom the war is a battle for freedom. Both voices still haunt today's struggles over race, rights, and the flag.

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gramm, Kent. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gramm, Kent

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gramm, Kent. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values

November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values

November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

Somebody's Darling: Essays on the Civil War

Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead

Manassas: A Novel of the War (Classics of Civil War Fiction)

Clare

Psalms for the Poor

Sharpsburg: A Civil War Narrative