Jon Meacham went on Comedy Central last night to talk about two projects he’s edited. One of them is American Homer, an essay collection on Shelby Foote which is packaged with a new edition of Foote’s Civil War trilogy. It’s an appropriate title; back when C-SPAN interviewed Foote, he agreed with a caller who cast his work in the Homeric narrative mold, as opposed to the more analytical model of other ancient writers like Thucydides.
Meacham’s other collection is an e-book on Bin Laden’s death and the War on Terror, which examines the shifts in American security efforts over the course of…well, the last week or so, I guess.
Past in the Present 
The other thing that’s interesting to contemplate is the American history that took place while Foote was researching an writing his trilogy, which volumes were published between 1958 and 1974 — the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the Great Society, assassinations, Watergate — and think about how those times may have influenced Foote’s narrative.
That looks like a neat boxed set. Anybody know the contents of the essay book?
The essays are by Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, Ken Burns, Annette Gordon-Reed, Michael Eric Dyson, Julia Reed, Robert Loomis, Donald Graham, John M. McCardell, Jr., and Jay Tolson, but I don’t know about the specific approaches they take.
–ML
Thanks