American Civil War Military

A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.

In 1873 the people of Labette County, Kansas made a grisly discovery. Buried by a trailside cabin beneath an orchard of young apple trees were the remains of countless bodies. Below the cabin itself was a cellar stained with blood. The Benders, the family of four who once resided on the property were nowhere to be found. The discovery sent the local community and national newspapers into a frenzy that continued for decades, sparking an epic manhunt for the Benders.

Thaddeus Stevens was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution - a chance to remake the country as a genuine multiracial democracy. As one of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party’s radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them. These policies - including welcoming black men into the Union’s armies - would prove crucial to the Union war effort.

New York Times best-selling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre”. When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre”, a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams.

Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation’s worst crisis in the “coping strategies” he had developed over a lifetime of persevering through depressive episodes and personal tragedies. With empathy and authority gained from his own experience with depression, Shenk crafts a nuanced, revelatory account of Lincoln and his legacy. Based on careful, intrepid research, Lincoln’s Melancholy unveils a wholly new perspective on how our greatest president brought America through its greatest turmoil.

One of the most studied and written about episodes in US history, the American Civil War remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. The conflict was one of the earliest industrial wars in which mass-produced weapons were employed. The mobilization of civilian factories, shipyards, transportation, and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I, World War II, and subsequent conflicts.

It was the most famous bank robbery of all time, involving the legendary James-Younger gang's final shocking holdup - the infamous Northfield Raid - and the thrilling two-week chase that followed. Mark Lee Gardner, author of the critically acclaimed To Hell on a Fast Horse, takes us inside Northfield's First National Bank and outside to the streets as Jesse James and his band of outlaws square off against the heroic citizens who risked their lives to defeat America's most daring criminals.

So many thousands of books deifying Abraham Lincoln have been published that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to learn much of anything that is truthful about Lincoln’s presidency. You’ll learn that the real reason why Lincoln launched an invasion of his own country (he never admitted that secession was legal or legitimate) was to destroy the voluntary union of the founders and replace it with a coerced union held together by violence and threats of violence, much more like the old Soviet Union than the original American union.

SHILOH, 1862 - The Battle of Shiloh, fought in the wilderness of southern Tennessee in April 1862, marked a violent crossroads in the Civil War. What began as a surprise attack by Confederate troops on a Union stronghold to gain control of the Mississippi River Valley became a bloody two-day conflict that would eerily foretell the brutal reality of the next three years.

A richly detailed account of the hard-fought campaign that led to Antietam Creek and changed the course of the Civil War. In early September 1862, thousands of Union soldiers huddled within the defenses of Washington, disorganized and discouraged from their recent defeat at Second Manassas.

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.

In 1991, the Kennedy brothers first published The South Was Right!, launching the modern movement of Southern awareness and activism. To date, the first and second edition of this book have sold more than 135,000 copies! Not for the faint of heart, The South Was Right! is an authoritative and well-documented study of the mythology behind “Civil War” history and its ongoing effects. In their new edition for a 21st-century audience, the Kennedys have updated their message to provide guidance for the harsh conditions against liberty.

In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated and significant figure.

For over 20 years, a select group of Yale undergraduates has been admitted into the year-long "Grand Strategy" seminar team-taught by John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy. Its purpose: to provide a grounding in strategic decision-making in the face of crisis to prepare future American leaders for important work. Now, John Lewis Gaddis has transposed the experience of that course into a wonderfully succinct, lucid and inspirational book, a view from the commanding heights of statesmanship across the landscape of world history from the ancient Greeks to Lincoln, and beyond.

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

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.

The murder of Abraham Lincoln set off the greatest manhunt in American history. From April 14 to April 26, 1865, the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, led Union cavalry and detectives on a wild 12-day chase through the streets of Washington, DC, across the swamps of Maryland, and into the forests of Virginia while the nation, still reeling from the just-ended Civil War, watched in horror and sadness.

Blood Moon is the story of the century-long blood feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. While little remembered today, their mutual hatred shaped the tragic history of the tribe far more than anyone, even the reviled President Andrew Jackson, ever did.

Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans—black and white—responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery. It addresses the quest of emancipated slaves’ searching for economic autonomy and equal citizenship, and describes the remodeling of Southern society; the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations; and the emergence of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and one committed, for a time, to the principle of equal rights for all Americans.