This award-winning history offers an intimate, ground-level account of the out-break and early years of the Civil War in its bloodiest theater: the Great Valley spanning Virginia and Pennsylvania. It marks a major departure from the view of the Civil War as an inevitable conflict between opposing sections with the North bound to prevail. A magnificent social history, it breathes life back into the people of the time, recovers the uncertainties and possibilities in the prewar crisis, and restores the drama to the shattering events of the war. Book jacket.