Mcpherson person

Is james m mcpherson related to james b mcpherson
James b. mcpherson death
James mcpherson civil war books

•

James M. McPherson

American historian (born 1936)

James Munro McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American historian specializing in the American Civil War. He is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. McPherson was the president of the American Historical Association in 2003.

Early life and education

Born in Valley City, North Dakota, McPherson graduated from St. Peter High School in St. Peter, Minnesota, and received his Bachelor of Arts in 1958 from Gustavus Adolphus College, also in St. Peter, from which he graduated magna cum laude. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1963, where he studied under C. Vann Woodward.^[1]

Career

McPherson joined the faculty of Princeton in 1962.^[1] His works include The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1965. In 1988, he published his Pulitzer-wi

•

"For A Vast Future Also": Lincoln and the Millennium

BY JAMES M. MCPHERSON

Jefferson Lecture
March 27, 2000

When Abraham Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton intoned: "Now he belongs to the ages."

Stanton's remark was more prescient than he knew, for Lincoln's image and his legacy became the possession not only of future ages of Americans but also of people of other nations. On the centenary of Lincoln's birth in 1909, Leo Tolstoy described him as "a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity." An Islamic leader projected a more militant image of Lincoln, declaring that America's sixteenth president "spoke with a voice of thunder. . .and his deeds were as strong as the rock." When Jacqueline Kennedy lived in the White House, she sought comfort in the Lincoln Room in times of trouble. "The kind of peace I felt in that room," she recalled, "was what you feel when going into a church. I used to feel his strength, I'd sort of be talking to him."

Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to persuade Jacqueline Kennedy's husband to iss

•

James Birdseye McPherson was a career U.S. Army officer and West Point alumnus who placed first in the graduating class of 1853. After a short stint as Assistant Instructor of Practical Engineering at West Point, he was assigned to various harbor defense projects in New York and Delaware. McPherson was overseeing the design and construction of fortifications on Alcatraz Island at San Francisco when the Civil War erupted in 1861.

Requesting a transfer to the east, McPherson was initially assigned to serve as aide-de-camp to General Henry Halleck in the Department of Missouri, but by February 1862, he was a lieutenant colonel and chief engineer on the staff of Ulysses S. Grant. McPherson's siege works played an important role in Grant's capture of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson and Corinth in Tennessee. In October 1862, he was promoted to major general and given command of the 2nd division of the Army of Tennessee and served in this capacity through the Vicksburg Campaign. He was killed at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, the second highest ranking Union officer to be killed in t