Civil War Military

Robert S. Levine foregrounds the viewpoints of Black Americans on Reconstruction in his absorbing account of the struggle between the great orator Frederick Douglass and President Andrew Johnson.

The Civil War divided a nation and turned brother against brother. Lasting four long years, it resulted in the deaths of more than 600,000 soldiers. IBOOKS For Young Readers presents a six-volume series devoted to this war, a war fought for liberation as well as reunification. With historic photographs and engaging text, "Civil War Chronicles recreates key battles and paints living portraits of the heroes who made the war of the states unforgettable."

The Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina, have been highly revered figures in American history, lauded for leaving behind their lives as elite slave-owning women on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand abolitionists in the North. Yet the focus on their story has obscured the experiences of their Black relatives, the progeny of their brother, Henry, and one of the enslaved people he owned, a woman named Nancy Weston.

Robert E. Lee is one of the most famous and decorated American generals in history. The son of Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, General Lee was a native of Virginia and a top graduate at West Point. So distinguished was Lee that President Abraham Lincoln offered him command of the entire Union army before the onset of the Civil War. Lee famously declined the offer and instead served his home state of Virginia after it seceded.

In Fateful Lightning, two-time Lincoln Prize-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo offers a marvelous portrait of the Civil War and its era, covering not only the major figures and epic battles, but also politics, religion, gender, race, diplomacy, and technology. He examines the strategy, the tactics, and the logistics of the Civil War and brings the most recent historical thinking to bear on emancipation, the presidency and the war powers, the blockade and international law, and the role of intellectuals, North and South.

John McCorkle was a young Missouri farmer of Southern sympathies. After serving briefly in the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard, he became a prominent member of William Clarke Quantrill's infamous guerrillas, who took advantage of the turmoil in the Missouri-Kansas borderland to prey on pro-Union people. McCorkle displayed an unflinchingly violent nature while he participated in raids and engagements including the massacres at Lawrence and Baxter Springs, Kansas; and Centralia, Missouri.

As a divided nation plunges into the deepest crisis in its history, Abraham Lincoln boards a train for Washington and his inauguration - an inauguration Southerners have vowed to prevent by any means necessary. Drawing on new research, this account reveals the president-elect as a work in progress, showing him on the verge of greatness, foiling an assassination attempt, and forging an unbreakable bond with the American people.

Actor Mahershala Ali performs the gripping tale of an armed band of Confederate deserters and slaves living in a mixed-race community who rose up against the Confederate Cavalry in 1863 to form their own republic, free of slavery, in what is now the state of Mississippi. The community they formed - and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants - confounded the rules of the segregated South well into the 20th century.

Soldiers called it one of the “waste places of nature” and “a region of gloom” - the wilderness of Virginia, 70 square miles of dense second-growth forest known as “the dark, close wood”. Here, in the spring of 1864, the Civil War escalated to a new level of horror. Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Federal armies, opened the campaign with a vow to never turn back. Robert E. Lee, commanding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, moved into the wilderness to block Grant’s advance. Immovable object intercepted irresistible force - and the wilderness burst into flame.

On March 20, 1822, the Missouri Republican published a notice addressed “to enterprising young men” in the St. Louis area. “The subscriber,” it said, “wishes to engage one hundred young men to ascend the Missouri River to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years. For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry…or of the subscriber near St. Louise.” The “subscriber” was General William H. Ashley, and among the “enterprising young men” who embarked with Major Henry less than a month later was 18-year-old James Bridger.

George Gordon Meade could hardly believe it: only three days earlier, he had been thrust unexpectedly into command of the Army of the Potomac, which was cautiously stalking its long-time foe, the Army of Northern Virginia, as it launched a bold invasion northward. Meade had hardly wrapped his head around the situation before everything exploded. Outside the small college town of Gettysburg, Confederates had inexplicably turned on the lead elements of Meade’s army and attacked.

Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis.

It's been eight years since Will Travers was thrown back in time. Now, at the height of his success, Will faces his greatest challenge. His son, while serving in the Texian army in California, is kidnapped. Weighing his duty to Texas against his duty to his family, Will resigns and recruits a few good men to accompany him in tracking down his son's kidnappers who have demanded a king's ransom or else! In a race against time Will chases the kidnappers across the continent, following their trail across seas and jungles. Failure will cost him more than just his family, it will cost him the ...

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Vice-President Andrew Johnson became "the Accidental President", it was a dangerous time in America. Devastated by war and resorting to violence, many white Southerners hoped to restore a pre-Civil War society, if without slavery, and the pugnacious Andrew Johnson seemed to share their goals. With profound insights and making use of extensive research, Brenda Wineapple dramatically evokes this pivotal period in American history, when the country was rocked by the first-ever impeachment of a sitting American president.

Operating in the vast and varied trans-Appalachian west, the Army of Tennessee was crucially important to the military fate of the Confederacy. But under the principal leadership of generals such as Braxton Bragg, Joseph E. Johnston, and John Bell Hood, it won few major battles, and many regard its inability to halt steady Union advances into the Confederate heartland as a matter of failed leadership.

Sarah Hubbard makes her living as a seamstress in her solitary home beside Willoughby Run, a creek near Gettysburg. Her loyalties are firmly on the side of the North so when Confederate soldier, Jesse Mitchell, seeks refuge at her home she cautiously agrees to help him. Jesse promised his sister-in-law to bring her husband, Jonas, home safely. With all the death he's witnessed fighting for "The Cause," protecting Jonas has become a matter of honor. He is prepared to die for his brother and his country. He appreciates his luck in finding a caring woman behind enemy lines.

Stories from - and about - a nation divided. At The Washington Post, the Civil War has held an enduring fascination for both readers and writers. Raging from 1861-1865, the Battle Between the States has left a lasting imprint on the United States' collective psyche for 150 years. This 150th Anniversary Collection aggregates historical data with contemporary reflections, as journalists and historians put the bloody war into context.

The Chinese Civil War was a decades-long struggle between the Nationalists and Communists that reshaped China and reverberated across the globe. This concise yet comprehensive book covers the war’s early battles, the impact of the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the final showdown that saw Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat to Taiwan. Listen about the ideologies and strategies of both sides and explore the global consequences of this war, which marked a pivotal moment in Cold War history.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution.” Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy, and progressive North with the South, which was stubbornly convinced of the necessity of slavery.

New York Times best-selling author and Newbery Honor-recipient Steve Sheinkin gives young listeners the causes and curses that divided America into Union and Confederate nations. Unraveling a very complicated string of events - the small things, the personal ones, the big issues - Steve Sheinkin takes listeners behind the scenes that led to the Civil War. It is a time and a war that threatened America's very existence, revealed in the surprising true stories of the soldiers and statesmen who battled it out.