A great retelling if this time in history. I had no idea how much he civil war affected the south. Mainly that many of them ended up defeated soldiers who came back poor trying to work farms. I am so thankful though, that the south didn’t win. Slavery was such an awful institution and a blemish in our history.
This goes through the general propaganda that deifies Lincoln that children are taught in school, even though it stands in strong contrast to what was documented at that time. Lincoln shut down newspapers, did water torture on northerners, refused to free even one slave where they could with the emancipation proclamation (read it). That's why several black historians damn him. Still, overall it takes broad strokes to paint the war-scape. It does point out how the horrific actions that were justified against civilians by the Union Army by the North opened up the doors for future atrocities (Spanish American, WWI, & WW2).
More focused on analysis and interpretation than facts and dates, but kind of dry. Much fewer illustrations than I think are needed for a book aimed at this age level. Possibly a good balance for if you have another Civil War book that is heavy on maps, dates, etc.