Discover the Best Books Written by James McPherson

James Munro McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American Civil War historian and 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. 

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

McPherson joined the faculty of Princeton in 1962. His works include The Struggle for Equality, which was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1965. In 1988, he published his Pulitzer-winning book, Battle Cry of Freedom. His 1990 book, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, argues that the emancipation of slaves amounts to a second American Revolution. McPherson's 1998 book, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, received the Lincoln Prize. 

In 2002, he published both a scholarly book, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam 1862, and a history of the American Civil War for children, Fields of Fury. McPherson published This Mighty Scourge in 2007, a series of essays about the American Civil War. One essay describes the huge difficulty of negotiation when regime change is a war aim on either side of a conflict. "For at least the past two centuries, nations have usually found it harder to end a war than to start one. 

Americans learned that bitter lesson in Vietnam, and apparently having forgotten it, we're forced to learn it all over again in Iraq." One of McPherson's examples is the American Civil War, in which both the Union and the Confederacy sought regime change. It took four years to end the war. There are all kinds of myths that a person has about himself, some positive, some negative, some healthy, and some not healthy. 

I think that one job of the historian is to try to cut through some of those myths and get closer to some kind of reality. So that people can face their current situation realistically rather than mythically. I guess that's my sense of what a historian ought to do. McPherson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1991. In 1995, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, presented by Awards Council member David McCullough.

In 2002, McPherson received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement. In 2007, he was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military history and was the first recipient of the prize. In 2007, he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement in military history given by the Society for Military History. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.