Biography

He joined the Mississippi National Guard as a protest to Hitler's war. His writings were interrupted when the guard was mobilized by draft in the year 1940. By 1942, Foote was commissioned and promoted to Captain. However, while at a base in Northern Ireland, Shelby was accused of insubordination because he was in Belfast without leave, visiting the Irish girl whom he later married. In 1944, Shelby Foote was court martialed and dismissed from the service.

Foote remained relatively obscure before his role in Ken Burns' "The Civil War", a PBS documentary series first broadcast in 1990 which made him well known. After that event, Foote came to be widely viewed as an authority on the Civil War.

Historian and author. His 3-volume set "The Civil War: A Narrative" is one of the standard reference works on the subject.

After being discharged from the Army during World War II, he joined the Marines. He never saw combat.

He was awarded three Guggenheim fellowships.

Picking any one moment or place is a romantic approach to history that I'm uneasy about. Singling out any one event from history as all-important. Every event is led up to by so many others, small and large. Besides, what you think about and where you'd want to go keeps changing.

Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy-and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it.

It would be nice to talk to Lincoln. He'd really talk to you. Maybe run circles around you. Not like others who you figure would be mostly rhetoric.

History is a pretty wretched subject to study in school. As I remember it, it was terrible. They required me to memorize so many things. There was a Treaty of Utrecht, and it has thirteen steps. I don't know one of those steps. But it had thirteen.

Plot makes a story move under its own power. And to neglect plotting as a device of history is a serious mistake. Among American historians, probably my favorite is Francis Parkman. Parkman's a wonderful historian. I had not read him until late in life to realize how good he was.