Brian Matthew Jordan, a Civil War historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist on the faculty of Sam Houston State University, relates the war experiences of German immigrants who had settled in northeastern Ohio and volunteered to serve in the Union army ... In his new book, A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death and Survival in the Union Army, Jordan uses a broad variety of sources—diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs—to tell the story of one battalion that suffered through the worst of the national catastrophe. His scholarly notes and bibliography are significant additions to the narrative ... Jordan relates the soldiers’ agony using the letters of those who survived combined with official records of the battle. At times, Jordan’s reliance on phrases from these communications results in choppy prose, but he accurately relays the tenor of those trying times ... Jordan’s impressive history tells their story of courage in the face of danger and undeniable hazard. The Ohio 107th and their counterparts throughout the Union army saved the nation in its time of greatest peril.
Affecting portrait of an Ohio infantry regiment in the Civil War. Jordan, a historian who has previously focused on Union veterans in the postwar era, follows a promising and fresh approach by studying the war through the lens of a single unit ... Reflecting the author’s previous scholarly interest, much of the book concerns the final year of the war and the immediate postwar era, when families at home suffered from those losses as well. Movingly, he writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men 'gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets' and remembered their fallen brothers in arms. A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history.
Historian Jordan (Marching Home) delivers a captivating chronicle of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during and after the Civil War ... Jordan profiles his characters with precision, revealing the deep emotional and physical scars they carried back from the conflict. This meticulous and engrossing history brings the Civil War to vivid life.
