American Civil War

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two....

On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention....

Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow returns with a sweeping and dramatic portrait of one of our most compelling generals and presidents, Ulysses S. Grant....

The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1 begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned. All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh....

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations....

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man....

The greatest of all Civil War campaigns, Gettysburg was the turning point of the turning point in our nation’s history. In Gettysburg Sears tells the whole story in a single volume....

The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 2 continues one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned. Focusing on the pivotal year of 1863....

In The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 3, Shelby Foote follows the events of the war from 1862 through 1864, discussing the strategies of both the North and the South....

In April of 1862 he was merely another Confederate general with only a single battle credential in an army fighting in what seemed to be a losing cause....

The Civil War is most remembered for the grand battles that have come to define it: Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, among others....

Among the autobiographies of great military figures, Ulysses S. Grant’s is certainly one of the finest, and it is arguably the most notable literary achievement of any American president....

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral....

The previously untold story of the violence in Congress that helped spark the Civil War....

A rousing and meticulously researched account of the notorious Battle of Little Big Horn and its unforgettable cast of characters from Sitting Bull to Custer himself....

In the best-selling tradition of Truman, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Herbert Donald offers a new classic in American history and biography....

As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began....

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's acclaimed Civil War history of the controversial Union commander whose battlefield brilliance ensured the downfall of the Confederacy....

American History, Volume 1 surveys the broad sweep of American history. Drawing on a deep range of research and years of classroom teaching experience, Thomas S. Kidd offers students an engaging overview of the first half of American history....

The dramatic story of one of America's greatest and most misunderstood military leaders and presidents, this is a major new interpretation of Ulysses S. Grant....

An epic history spanning the battlegrounds of the Civil War and the violent turmoil of Reconstruction to the forgotten electoral crisis that nearly fractured a reunited nation, To Rescue the Republic dramatically reveals Ulysses S. Grant’s essential yet underappreciated role....

The period following the Civil War was one of the most controversial eras in American history. This comprehensive account of the period captures the drama of those turbulent years....

In 1855, with the United States at odds over slavery, the lawyer Abraham Lincoln wrote a note to his best friend, the son of a Kentucky slaveowner. Lincoln rebuked his friend for failing to oppose slavery....

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him....

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise comes to life....

In 1993, Jacqueline Tobin visited the Old Market Building in the historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, where craftspeople sell their wares. Amid piles of beautiful handmade quilts, Tobin met African American quilter Ozella Williams and the two struck up a conversation. With the admonition to "write this down," Williams began to tell a fascinating story that had been handed down from her mother and grandmother before her. As Tobin sat in rapt attention, Williams began to describe how slaves made coded quilts and then used them to navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad.

Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small—a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.

The high command of the Army of the Potomac was a changeable, often dysfunctional band of brothers, going through the fires of war under seven commanding generals in three years, until Grant came east in 1864. The men in charge all too frequently appeared to be fighting against the administration in Washington instead of for it, increasingly cast as political pawns facing down a vindictive congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War.

Captain Ulysses S. Grant rose to become general-in-chief of the United States Army in 1864. Was it destiny? Or was he just an ordinary man, opportunistically benefiting from the turmoil of the Civil War to advance to the highest military rank? Soldier of Destiny reveals that Grant always possessed the latent abilities of a skilled commander-and he was able to develop these skills out West without the overwhelming pressure faced by more senior commanders in the Eastern theater at the beginning of the Civil War.

Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work "surrealistic and disturbing."