""A superior piece of Civil War scholarship."" - Edwin C. Bearss, former Chief Historian of the United States National Park Service and award-winning author.The nine-month siege of Petersburg was the longest continuous operation of the American Civil War. A series of large-scale Union ""offensives,"" grand maneuvers that triggered some of the fiercest battles of the war, broke the monotony of static trench warfare. Grant's Fourth Offensive, August 14-25, the longest and bloodiest operation of the campaign, is the subject of John Horn's revised and updated Sesquicentennial edition of The Siege