Pathway to Hell

by Brandt, Dennis W.

• ISBN13: 9780803228245
• ISBN10: 0803228244
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-07-01
• Publisher: Bison Books

Summary

Shell shock, battle fatigue, posttraumatic stress disorder, lack of moral courage: different terms For The same mental condition, formal names that change with observed circumstances and whenever experts feel prompted to coin a more suitable descriptive term For The shredding of the human spirit. Although the spectre of psychological dysfunction has marched alongside all soldiers in all wars, always at the ready to ravish minds, rarely is it discussed when the topic is America's greatest conflict, The Civil War. Yet mind-destroying terror was as present at Gettysburg and Antietam as in Vietnam and today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drawing almost exclusively from extensive primary accounts, Dennis W. Brandt presents a detailed case study of mental stress that is exceptional in the vast literature of the American Civil War.Pathway to Helloffers sobering insight into the horrors that war wreaked upon one young man and illuminates the psychological aspect of the War Between the States.

Author Biography

Dennis W. Brandt is a freelance author-historian and the author of From Home Guards to Heroes: The 87th Pennsylvania and Its Civil War Community and Shattering the Truth: The Slandering of Abraham Lincoln. Richard Wheeler is the author of over sixteen books of military history, including Voices of 1776: The Story of the American Revolution in the Words of Those Who Were There. Thomas P. Lowry is a retired psychiatrist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco and continues his work as an independent historical scholar. He is the author of Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Nebraska 2005).

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. 9
Preface	p. 11
Acknowledgments	p. 15
Abbreviations	p. 17
Prologue: And So It Concludes	p. 21
Influence	p. 26
Growing Up	p. 41
Pennsylvania Calls	p. 46
When It Was Still Called Glory	p. 53
Fight!	p. 64
Down in the Valley	p. 75
Closer to Darkness	p. 84
Bloodiest Day	p. 90
Hell Itself	p. 100
Top of the Slide	p. 108
Depths	p. 120
Home, Where the War Never Ends	p. 146
Analyzing the Dead	p. 155
Was Angelo Unique?	p. 170
Epilogue	p. 179
A Psychiatric Meditation: Thoughts on Angelo Crapsey	p. 187
Selected Bibliography	p. 191
Index	p. 199
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