"Students of the Civil War tend to focus attention on the great campaigns and battles that took place in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, a practice that Richard M. McMurry contends has distorted many facets of the war. The July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, for example, came to be widely - if erroneously - regarded as the "decisive battle" and the "turning point" of the war as well as the "high tide" of the Confederacy.

In The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm, McMurry, using a "counter-factual" account of the 1864 campaigns in Virginia, presents a view of the Civil War from the West - moving from the narrow confines of the Old Dominion to the vast Trans-Appalachian region - and gives the reader a new and far more complete understanding of why and how the war ended in a Union victory and of the roles played by several of the conflict's major actors."--BOOK JACKET.