Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
Published 1988 · 280,000 words · about 19 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction
How hard is Battle Cry of Freedom to read?
Battle Cry of Freedom scores 26 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Military and political terminology. Accessible for history.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Historical analysis grounded in events and personalities.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Extremely dense. Covers an entire era in one volume.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Chronological with thematic integration.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Freedom and union as competing national symbols.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Measured, scholarly tone.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- The war's outcome is known. The meaning is explored.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Two parts, multiple theaters, political and military threads.
How Battle Cry of Freedom is regarded
Battle Cry of Freedom holds a literary regard score of 63 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.