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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAbout the book\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In the fall of 1864, General William T. Sherman<\/strong> led his army through\u00a0Atlanta, Georgia<\/strong>, burning buildings of military significance\u2014and\u00a0ultimately most of the city\u2014along the way. From Atlanta, they\u00a0marched across the state to the most important city at the time:\u00a0Savannah<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mired in the deep of the South with no reliable supply lines,\u00a0Sherman\u2019s army had to live off the land and the provisions on the\u00a0plantations they seized along the way. As the army marched to\u00a0the east, plantation owners fled, but even before they did so,\u00a0slaves self-emancipated to Union lines. By the time the army\u00a0seized Savannah in December, as many as 20,000 enslaved\u00a0people had attached themselves to Sherman\u2019s army.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Somewhere Toward Freedom<\/em>, historian Bennett Parten\u00a0brilliantly reframes this seminal episode in Civil War<\/strong> history. He\u00a0not only helps us understand how Sherman\u2019s March impacted the\u00a0war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it\u00a0laid the foundation for the fledgling efforts of Reconstruction.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sherman\u2019s march has remained controversial to this day. But as Parten reveals, it played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it. In Somewhere Toward Freedom<\/em>, this critical moment in American history has finally been given the attention it deserves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bennett Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University whose area of expertise is the Civil War period. He is a native of Royston, Georgia, and completed his PhD in history at Yale University. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post<\/em>, Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>, Zocalo Public Square<\/em>, and The Civil War Monitor<\/em>, among others. He currently lives in Savannah, Georgia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert Colby is an award-winning scholar and teacher of United States history, and the author of An Unholy Traffic: Slave trading in the Civil War South<\/em>. His work on the domestic slave trade during the Civil War has won the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize and the Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award and Anne J. Bailey Prize from the Society of Civil War Historians. Originally from Virginia (where he grew up walking Civil War battlefields), he is now an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAbout the author\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nAbout the conversation partner\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n