During the hottest days of the summer of 1863, while the nation's attention was focused on a small town in Pennsylvania known as Gettysburg, another momentous battle was being fought along the banks of the Mississippi. In the longest single campaign of the war, the siege of Vicksburg left 19,000 dead and wounded on both sides, gave the Union Army control of the Mississippi, and left the Confederacy cut in half. In this highly-anticipated new work, Christopher Waldrep takes a fresh look at how the Vicksburg campaign was fought and remembered. He begins with a gripping account of the battle, deftly recounting the experiences of African-American troops fighting for the Union. Waldrep shows how as the scars of battle faded, the memory of the war was shaped both by the Northerners who controlled the battlefield and by the legacies of race and slavery that played out over the decades that followed.

"Waldrep shows how reunions, memorial days, and the establishment of a national cemetery and the Vicksburg National Military Park kept alive racial memories of the battle, promoting patriotism and military heroism. . . . Highly recommended." - Library Journal

"The artifacts uncovered for Vicksburg's Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance include 633 endnotes. There are references from the Civil War generals' memoirs . . . but many more taken from the journals, letters, and diaries of ordinary soldiers and civilians of Vicksburg during the war and Reconstruction era. . . . What is clear from his findings is the warning to any culture setting out to right another culture's wrongs: Understand the culture and its myths, it is one thing to prevail over it militarily. It is quite another to change its beliefs." - The Dallas Morning News

"Memory is a hot topic in Civil War history right now, and Vicksburg's Long Shadow makes some valuable contributions to the genre. Waldrep's careful delineation of the ways that northerners and the federal government shaped the southern landscape adds nuance to our understanding of the power of the Lost Cause. At the same time, Waldrep is careful to remind us that northern memories of the war were often no more focused on emancipation and less distorted than those of white southerners." - Journal of American History

"This book, then, is both a fascinating case study that hones in on the particular memory of a critical Civil War battle and a work of scholarship that engages much broader concern and methodologies in Civil War studies." - American Historical Review

"This important study will surely serve as the standard for years to come." - H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online