Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

Summary

T. J. Stiles offers a full portrait of George Armstrong Custer that reaches well beyond his death at the Little Bighorn. He presents a restless, contradictory man whose Civil War fame, debts, and ambition mirrored a country racing into a new industrial age. The biography matters because it uses one famous life to capture the tensions of nineteenth century America, from race and politics to celebrity and money.