Gary Gallagher: evaluation

Transcript context

…What should we take away from the fact that most of the fighting had the rules of war behind it? So it was more structured, it was– I think what we take away from that supports my argument that this is a war between two mid-19th century nation states that have a sense of how you fight a war. You fight a war with national armies who are led by professional soldiers and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war, and all the war, the war’s limits expand as it goes on, but it doesn’t reach the point where you have indiscriminate killing of civilians and so forth. You just don’t… I mean, there’s an argument about whether it’s a total war or not. It all depends on how you define total war. As you’ve mentioned, in terms of how encompassing it was, as total a war as it gets because the entirety of the society was involved in it.…

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