American Military History

MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world?

Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance.

In the late summer and fall of 1777, after two years of indecisive fighting on both sides, the outcome of the American War of Independence hung in the balance. Having successfully expelled the Americans from Canada in 1776, the British were determined to end the rebellion the following year and devised what they believed a war-winning strategy, sending General John Burgoyne south to rout the Americans and take Albany.

By May 1864, General Robert E. Lee had been transformed from a young soldier into a gray-haired patriarch of the Confederate cause. As Lee struggled to keep his ragged soldiers alive, he faced pressure from two fronts. Grant’s Union Army not only had superior numbers, but a steadfast infrastructure of railroads and industrialized supply routes. Lee’s Last Campaign is a triumph of historic research and elegant writing. In this essential analysis of General Lee’s military strategy, Dowdey follows the triumphs and tragedies of the Army of Northern Virginia as it breathed its last gasps at the end of the Civil War.

No espionage missions have been kept more secret than those involving American submarines. Now, Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables. It unveils how the navy's own negligence might have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared, all hands lost, 30 years ago.

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing him, as Chernow reveals in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

General Sherman's 1864 burning of Atlanta solidified his legacy as a ruthless leader. Yet Sherman proved far more complex than his legendary military tactics reveal. James Lee McDonough offers fresh insight into a man tormented by the fear that history would pass him by, who was plagued by personal debts, and who lived much of his life separated from his family.

December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.

This prize-winning and critically acclaimed history uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from 13 disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower.

For generations of Americans, the word Antietam - the name of a bucolic stream in western Maryland - held the same sense of horror and carnage that the date 9/11 does for Americans today. But Antietam eclipses even this modern tragedy as America's single bloodiest day, on which 22,000 men became casualties in a war to determine our nation's future.

This New York Times best seller is a thrilling account of one of the most pivotal moments in United States history. Six months after the Declaration of Independence, America was nearly defeated. Then on Christmas night, George Washington led his men across the Delaware River to destroy the Hessians at Trenton. A week later Americans held off a counterattack, and in a brilliant tactical move, Washington crept behind the British army to win another victory. The momentum had reversed.

Oliver Otis Howard thought he was a man of destiny. Chosen to lead the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War, the Union Army general was entrusted with the era's most crucial task: helping millions of former slaves claim the rights of citizens. He was energized by the belief that abolition and Reconstruction, the country's great struggles for liberty and equality, were God's plan for himself and the nation.

Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War as viewed though the eyes of ordinary people - foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illuminated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, this path-breaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America's most destructive conflict.

the most spectacular conflicts between Grant and Lee and details the end of hope for the Confederacy. Utilizing various collections of unpublished letters written by soldiers, personal diaries of spouses and relatives, memoirs of soldiers and their families, and official war records, Catton follows Grant's campaigns from early 1864 to the end of the war, detailing many crucial battles along the way.

In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. His goal was to secure weapons and start a slave rebellion. The raid was a failure, but it galvanized the nation and sparked the Civil War. Still one of the most controversial figures in American history, John Brown's actions raise interesting questions about unsanctioned violence that can be justified for a greater good.

Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were "isolated incidents" in the Vietnam War, carried out by a few "bad apples." However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves."

It was the largest campaign ever attempted in the Civil War: the Peninsula campaign of 1862. General George McClellan planned to advance from Yorktown up the Virginia Peninsula and destroy the Rebel army in its own capital. But with Robert E. Lee delivering blows to the Union army, McClellan’s plan fell through at the gates of Richmond.

The J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois and associate editor of North and South magazine, Bruce Levine presents a gripping chronicle of the cultural and economic upheaval the South experienced during and after the Civil War. Drawing upon a treasure trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and government documents, Levine offers a unique perspective on the old South's demise through the voices of those who lived through the conflict.

Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.