The Mosby Myth

Reviews / Votes

Paul Ashdown and Ed Caudill provide an outstanding, thoroughly researched, and entertaining analysis of the Mosby legend in American popular culture. -- James A. Ramage, Northern Kentucky University Here is a first-rate study of how we as a people come to know what we think we know about our historical past. -- James Ogden III, historian, Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia Paul Ashdown and Ed Caudill do a fine job of separating the myth from reality and a splendid job of explaining the creation of the legend and how it fits in the American story, our national folklore, our image of ourselves. -- David B. Sachsman, West Chair of Excellence, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; director of the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression Ashdown and Caudill's work is thoroughly researched, each chapter concluding with a series of detailed notes. The book makes a fine addition to the library of any Civil War scholar or amateur buff. * Teaching History: A Journal of Methods * The Mosby Myth contributes to the scholarship of the realtionship between history and memory. What emerges from the pages is a story of the development of the Mosby Myth and and explanation fo why it endures, thus showing in a large context how Americans form and use their memories of the Civil War. -- Sharon A. Roger Hepburm, Radford Universtiy * Military History Of The West * In a time when more and more fields of Civil War study have been rendered fallow by repetitive use, Ashdown and Caudill plow fresh, fertile soil by focusing on the many ways a hero and his public collaborate to create a legend. While they offer a brief life of Mosby in a vigorous style, they go on to explain lucidly how and why the 'Gray Ghost' has captured the imagination of Americans for almost 150 years. -- David Madden, founding director of The United States Civil War Center, editor of <B>Beyond the Battlefield<B>