The Civil War isn’t what it used to be. Instead of the romantic version, a “good war” of courage and glory, that emerged in the conflict’s immediate aftermath, or the post-civil-rights-era emphasis on the war as the vector of liberation for 4 million enslaved African Americans, a more recent direction has been labeled the “dark turn.” Grim rather than celebratory, it has chronicled the war’s cost and cruelty, exploring subjects such as death, ruins, starvation, disease, atrocities, torture, amputations, and postwar trauma, as well as a freedom that was rapidly undermined. Explore the March 2026 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s gripping new book, aptly titled A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War, represents an essential contribution to this rethinking in its account of what was perhaps the most horrifying realization of the suffering and inhumanity the war produced. But Brundage, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does more than expand our understanding …