The Killer Angels Themes

War: what is it good for? Nothing? Ending slavery? Defeating Hitler? We don't have the answers—those are up to you. But hey, that is what The Killer Angels is all about.The Battle of Gettysburg i...

The Killer Angels is about war, and war involves a lot of death. This isn't a Nerf War—the Civil War involved real bullets and bayonets, which have a known tendency to actually kill people. Being...

There's no way around it, even though many of the Southern characters try: slavery and racism are central themes in The Killer Angels. The Confederates insist that they're not fighting for slavery;...

So, yeah, we know we were all like, "We're getting the heavy themes like war and death and slavery out of the way right away!" Okay, well, bear with us. We haven't talked about suffering yet.Suffer...

Without courage, there would've been no Battle of Gettysburg and no Killer Angels… everyone would've just freaked out and ran away. But this book is about more than just sheer guts in battle; it'...

The Confederates and the Union soldiers have pretty different ideas about patriotism, and The Killer Angels is all about presenting all sides of the argument. The Union supporters are loyal to the...

There were major principles at stake for the North and the South during the Civil War—they had different concepts of freedom, different ideas of loyalty. In Chamberlain's view, what makes the Nor...

Do we control our own destinies, or are we just puppets controlled by the gods? The soldiers at Gettysburg had a lot of opportunities to wonder about these questions. After all, their fates were in...

The North and the South don't just have different attitudes towards slavery—they're two different societies, with different ethnicities and religious denominations. The South is more aristocratic...

The Northerners don't really get as romantic about the North as the Southerners get about the South: Chamberlain remembers Maine fondly, but he sees himself more as a citizen of the world than as a...