Mingling history, memoir and travelogue, this fresh, provocative, fast-paced adventure will leave many readers itching to travel in Horwitz's tracks.

Tony Horwitz returns home from reporting on foreign war zones to discover a different conflict raging on his own doorstep. Though the Civil War ended in 1865, it remains very much aflame in the hearts and minds of Americans, Southerners in particular. Propelled by his own lifelong passion for the South and the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a ten-state journey of discovery--personal, historical, and sociological--to understand why he and millions of other Americans obsess on the 1860s.

During his trip, Horwitz joins "hardcore" Civil War reenactors who replicate every detail of a rebel soldier's life, right down to the hardtack and the lice. The women are equally obsessed, including a real-life Scarlett O'Hara and the 90-year-old widow of a Confederate soldier. Horwitz finds that the symbols of the Old South remain raw and racially divisive, in one case leading to murder. From Charleston to Richmond, from Andersonville to Shiloh, Horwitz explores the War's historic and modern terrain, as well as interviewing Shelby Foote and other scholars to peel away the myths and misconceptions that cloud our understanding of history.

Tony Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, has given us the Civil War in ways we've never seen it before, and a fascinating, engaging adventure through the contemporary and historical South.