Sublimity and Terror shatters the pernicious idea that most Americans were forever traumatized by the experience of civil war.
Focusing on a group of wounded Union soldiers, it reveals how their wartime experiences influenced their postwar civilian lives. Using a social-scientific approach and drawing upon his firsthand experience as an experienced psychiatrist, Stephen Goldman has written an unorthodox but highly informative book. Placing their stories in the context of the eyewitness accounts of veterans from other major conflicts through U.S. history, this book offers a unique historical perspective on a mental illness that remains all too prevalent in modern society.