Brian Matthew Jordan is an associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. His first book, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. He lives in Willis, Texas.
Historian Jordan (Marching Home) delivers a captivating chronicle of the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during and after the Civil War.... Jordan portrays Ohio as a hotbed of antiwar sentiment; details how one private in the 107th won the Medal of Honor; and recounts the lengths veterans went to in order to secure pensions and medical benefits for themselves and their loved ones.... Jordan profiles his characters with precision, revealing the deep emotional and physical scars they carried back from the conflict. This meticulous and engrossing history brings the Civil War to vivid life. -- Publishers Weekly, starred review The personal sacrifice of soldiers in war often gets lost in military histories, and Jordan's moving account of the 107th Ohio is a welcome corrective. -- Library Journal Movingly, [Jordan] writes in an epilogue of a reunion of the regiment at Gettysburg, when the men 'gripped walking sticks, not rifled muskets' and remembered their fallen brothers in arms. A well-conceived, thoughtfully written contribution to Civil War history. -- Kirkus Reviews A Thousand May Fall is a scholarly and literary achievement, a unique study not only of a Civil War regiment, but perhaps also the deepest probing ever of the experience of soldiers in that awful war. Jordan writes about the men of the 107th Ohio as though he became their neighbors, their confidant, their scribe. We learn the political impulses of these mostly German-born men, especially about slavery. The research is almost unfathomable in its granular depth, and the story a journey into the lived physical and medical reality of war. Above all, Jordan has written a singular study of human emotions under the greatest sustained pressures. -- David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Like many other regiments in the 11th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, the 107th Ohio was composed mostly of German-Americans and shared the Corps' unhappy role as scapegoat for the army's defeat at Chancellorsville and the first day at Gettysburg. This stigma shaped much of the regiment's experience, which was otherwise typical of Civil War soldiering. In this splendid regimental history, Brian Matthew Jordan gives color and texture to that hard-knock experience. -- James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era Prodigiously researched and elegantly crafted, Brian Matthew Jordan's A Thousand May Fall chronicles the lives of the men of the 107th Ohio, a regiment roughly seventy percent foreign-born. Unlike many midwestern units that fought for abolition as much as reunion, the 'ethnically German' regiment remained loyal to the Democratic Party and believed that nativism, and not unfree labor, presented the greatest danger to American liberties. Jordan's vivid prose and engaging narrative brings his characters and battlefields to life. A powerful and moving story. -- Douglas R. Egerton, Lincoln Prize-winning author of Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America