Civil War Military History

The fascinating, true origin story of baseball - how America’s first great sport developed and how it conquered a nation.

This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the US Army. In 1918 the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female "wire experts" when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire.

Born in Slavery is a collection of the expression of former slaves. Having described the slavery from which they were emancipated, they then speak of a new slavery of exclusion and hatred.

A novel and brilliant look at how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership: acclaimed historian Michael J. Gerhardt, who appeared during the impeachment proceedings of President Trump, reveals how a group of five men mentored an obscure lawyer with no executive experience to become American’s greatest leader

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.

At the end of the summer of 1859, 22-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than 3,000 cases - including more than 25 murder trials - during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him.

This is the first book-length survey of the Union's "hard war" against the people of the Confederacy. It chronicles the St. Louis massacre - the events leading to, and suffering caused by, the federal decree that forced 20,000 Missouri civilians into exile. Thoroughly researched from sources including letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts of the time, it also pays attention to the suffering of African-American victims of Federal brutality. The title serves to set the record straight, to show that the war on civilians was not justified or necessary to save the union.

Most Americans consider Abraham Lincoln to be the greatest president in history. His legend as the Great Emancipator has grown to mythic proportions as hundreds of books, a national holiday, and a monument in Washington, D.C., extol his heroism and martyrdom. But what if most everything you knew about Lincoln were false? What if, instead of an American hero who sought to free the slaves, Lincoln were in fact a calculating politician who waged the bloodiest war in American history in order to build an empire that rivaled Great Britain's?

A groundbreaking new history, telling the stories of hundreds of African-American activists and officeholders who risked their lives for equality - in the face of murderous violence - in the years after the Civil War. By 1870, just five years after Confederate surrender and 13 years after the Dred Scott decision ruled blacks ineligible for citizenship, Congressional action had ended slavery and given the vote to black men. That same year, Hiram Revels and Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American U.S. senator and congressman respectively.

Waged from June 26 to September 1, 1862, the Second Manassas campaign pitted the US Armies of Virginia and the Potomac against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and its new commander, Robert E. Lee. The campaign unfolded against a backdrop of momentous US political decisions regarding confiscation, emancipation, and Confederate civilians. These decisions dismayed and energized Confederates, sparking the debut of Lee's offensive strategy. Weeks of strategic movements were punctuated by savage fighting that culminated in a climactic battle on August 28-30.

As 1862 dawned, the American republic was at death’s door. The federal government appeared overwhelmed, the U.S. Treasury was broke, and the Union’s top general was gravely ill. The Confederacy - with its booming economy, expert military leadership, and commanding position on the battlefield - had a clear view to victory. To a remarkable extent, the survival of the country depended on the judgment, cunning, and resilience of the unschooled frontier lawyer who had recently been elected president. Twelve months later, the Civil War had become a cataclysm but the tide had turned.

Harris' Brandywine is the first complete study to merge the strategic, political, and tactical history of this complex operation and important set-piece battle into a single compelling account. More than a decade in the making, his sweeping prose relies almost exclusively upon original archival research and his personal knowledge of the terrain. Told largely through the words of those who fought there, Brandywine will take its place as one of the most important military studies of the American Revolution ever written.

The first of a multivolume history of Lincoln as a political genius - from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, his assassination, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War dreams of Reconstruction. This first volume traces Lincoln from his painful youth, describing himself as "a slave", to his emergence as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln.

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, tells the story of his life in his own words. In this opening volume, Grant covers his early years, including his time at the U.S. military academy at West Point and his service during the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor. Grant wrote his memoirs in order to rescue his family from debt and they were published as he lay dying of throat cancer. Today, they are an American classic.

Social statistics of 1900 indicate that material quality of life was lower for most black Americans than under slavery. Kirkpatrick Sale marshals much forgotten evidence to cast this glorious part of American history in a realistic and critical light. Emancipation, yes. But as a military measure during a cruel war of invasion? Slavery once existed throughout the western hemisphere, but almost everywhere except the United States, it ended peacefully.

This classic collection of essays, edited by Booker T. Washington and with contributions from many of post-Civil War America's other prominent African-American thinkers, sought to redefine the role of Black persons in the new Jim Crow era and beat back white supremacy through racial uplift. Seven essays include Charles Chesnutt's "The Disfranchisement of the Negro", W. E. B. DuBois "The Talented Tenth", and Wilford Horace Smith's "The Negro and the Law" .

Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson provides a historic tour through Gettysburg, one of our nation's most visited cities, and the site of the bloodiest and perhaps most consequential battle ever fought by Americans. Listeners will be transported by McPherson's meaningful reflection, historical description, and his intimate stories from his own experiences at Gettysburg.

In this revelatory study, award-winning historian Leonard L. Richards outlines the links between the Gold Rush and the Civil War. He explains that Southerners envisioned California as a new market for slaves, schemed to tie California to the South via railroad, and imagined splitting off the state's southern half as a slave state. Richards recounts the political battles and the fiery California feuds, duels, and, perhaps, outright murders as the state came shockingly close to being divided in two.

This book is considered to be the best account of the Civil War ever written from the Confederate point of view. It is also the one most frequently cited by historians of the Western campaigns. Sam Watkins, a high private in the Army of Tennessee, brings a vividness and detail to his story unmatched in the genre.

Widely praised and winner of the 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, this book illuminates why Lincoln’s unprecedented welcoming of African American men and women to the White House transformed the trajectory of race relations in the United States. From his 1862 meetings with Black Christian ministers, Lincoln began inviting African Americans of every background into his home, from ex-slaves from the Deep South to champions of abolitionism such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.