Ronald C. White | ON GREAT FIELDS in conversation with Ben Eason

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses comes the dramatic and definitive biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the most-celebrated Union General without a comprehensive biography—until now.
“A vital and vivid portrait of an unlikely military hero who played a key role in the preservation of the Union and therefore in the making of modern America.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of And There Was Light
Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running low on ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg, Chamberlain survived the war, going on to serve as president of Bowdoin College and be elected governor of Maine four times.
This definitive, cradle-to-grave biography from award-winning historian Ronald C. White delves into General Chamberlain’s upbringing in rural Maine, his tenacious, empathetic military leadership, and his influential postwar public service, exploring a question that still plagues so many veterans: How do you make a civilian life of meaning after having experienced the extreme highs and lows of war?
Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic Civil War novel, The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns’ timeless miniseries The Civil War, but in this book, White captures the complex and inspiring man behind the hero. Heavily illustrated and featuring ten detailed maps, this gripping, impeccably researched portrait illuminates one of the most admired but least known figures in our nation’s bloodiest conflict.

Ronald C. White is the New York Times bestselling author of biographies A. Lincoln and American Ulysses, as well as three other books on Lincoln, most recently Lincoln in Private. White earned his PhD at Princeton, has lectured at the White House, and has spoken about Lincoln across the world. He is a senior fellow of The Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C.

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