Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was an author and historian of the American Civil War. A native of Greenville, Mississippi, Foote left college early to enlist in the US Army in 1940. After the war he worked as a journalist, and wrote historical fiction, before becoming a historian specialising in the Civil War period. He wrote a 3000 page three volume history, and became well known to the public from his appearance in Ken Burns' documentary series The Civil War (1990).

Sourced

• Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
  • Interviewed in the documentary series The Civil War (1990)

• The bare bones of my life are almost unbearable. I was born during the First World War. I spent my adolescence in the Depression, and when I came of age, I was involved in the Second World War. That sounds a pretty horrible series of events. They seem perfectly natural to me. I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe. And the Second World War was a wonderful thing to be with. It's now called "the Good War." We usually referred to it as "this damned war." We didn't think of it as a good war. We did believe it was fought in a good cause.
  • Interview for the Academy of Acheivment, Washington, D. C. (18 June 1999)

• People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
  • As quoted in his Profile at the Academy of Acheivment

• I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value.
  • As quoted in his Profile at the Academy of Acheivment

• The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
  • Shelby Foote, The Civil War, A Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1986), 815. ISBN 0-394-74623-6.