Chris Mackowski is a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at St. Bonaventure University in Allegany, New York. He also works as a historian with the National Park Service at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, where he gives tours at four major Civil War battlefields (Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania), as well as at the building where Stonewall Jackson died. He's the author of books on the battles of Chancellorsville and the Wilderness, and his writing has appeared in several national magazines. He blogs regularly for Scholars and Rogues.Mackowski and White are longtime friends and have co-authored several books together, including The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson and Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg, along with monograph-length articles on the battle of Spotsylvania for Blue & Gray. They have also written for Civil War Times, America's Civil War, and Hallowed Ground. They are co-founders of the blog, Emerging Civil War

This Civil War history and guide offers a vivid chronicle of this dramatic yet misunderstood battle, plus invaluable information for battlefield visitors.
The battle of Fredericksburg is usually remembered as the most lopsided Union defeat of the Civil War. It is sometimes called "Burnside's folly," after Union commander Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside who led the Army of the Potomac to ruin along the banks of the Rappahannock River. Confederates, fortified behind a stone wall along a sunken road, poured a hail of lead into them as they charged. One eyewitness summed it up saying, "it is only murder now."
But the battle remains one of the most misunderstood and misremembered engagements of the war. Burnside started with a well-conceived plan and had every reason to expect victory. How did it go so terribly wrong?
Authors Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White have worked for years along Fredericksburg's Sunken Road and Stone Wall, and they've escorted thousands of visitors across the battlefield. Simply Murder not only recounts Fredericksburg's tragic story of slaughter, but includes vital information about the battlefield itself and the insights they've learned from years of walking the ground.