naval ankd history professor wayne hsieh looks at the generalship of robert e. lee, part of a course called the american way of war. it is 50 minutes. >> as you know, the topic of a class is robert e. lee and not just to talk about lee's life and career but to sort of assess his generalship, assess his command. the first thing obviously when you needed to do something like this and we'll do this with grant on friday. the reason i have the class structured this way is because as we'll probably talk about later in this class, if you criticize or defend a lot of times it ends up being in comparison to grant and you probably notice that for example especially in the widely reading. before we get to grant, why don't we start with lee and a lot of this comes down to if we're going to talk about how we assess the general and a commander's abilities, if i can come in, the question then becomes what is the criteria one uses for that. now, does anyone in your readings think that lee has no merit as a journal whatsoever? does anyone say lee is terrible to everything? it is

naval academy history professor wayne hsieh as he talks about the generalship of ulysses s. grant, called "the way of war." it's 50 minutes. >> so today we will do grant. with lee, obviously one of the ways that class was structured you had obviously one historian who thought lee was an excellent battlefield general and a terrible strategist and then you had another historian, my former teacher gallagher who made the argument that lee's strategy was plausible. it didn't work out but it wasn't because his strategy was implausible or not well executed. today is -- what you might have noticed, i didn't really give you an anti-grant reading meaning grant is terrible. and the reason for that is the known, i didn't give you an anti-grant reading, meaning grant is terrible. the reason for that is the consensus of you amongst most modern historians is that grant was a great general. there's always issues for debate. but the current scholarship is extraordinarily positive. you know, i more or less subscribe to that view and it's hard to get a really good grant the butcher reading tha