American Civil War Military

One of the enduring yet little-examined themes in Civil War lore is the widespread belief that on the field of battle and afterward, members of Masonic lodges would give aid and comfort to wounded or captured enemy Masons, often at great personal sacrifice and danger. This work is a deeply researched examination of the recorded, practical effects of Freemasonry among Civil War participants on both sides.

Two of the great themes of the Civil War are how Lincoln found his war-winning general in Ulysses Grant and how Grant finally defeated Lee. Grant's Victory intertwines these two threads in a grand narrative that shows how Grant made the difference in the war.

When Vicksburg fell to Union forces under General Grant in July 1863, the balance turned against the Confederacy in the trans-Appalachian theater. The Federal success along the river opened the way for advances into central and eastern Tennessee, which culminated in the bloody battle of Chickamauga and then a struggle for Chattanooga. Chickamauga is usually counted as a Confederate victory, albeit a costly one.

Learn about the history of the U.S. Civil War with the iMinds JNR audio-learning series for younger minds. A civil war is a war where the two opposing sides come from the same country. It is a war that occurs within a single nation. The U.S. Civil War was waged from 1861 to 1865 and was fought between the Northern states (making up the Union) and eleven Southern states (the Confederacy). A major cause of the U.S. Civil War was the North's condemnation of slavery.

In every war, there are those battles that mark a turning point, after which everything is different. These are the battles that help determine how the war will proceed. The Battle of Bunker Hill was one of those battles in the American Revolutionary War. While it was a battle that the American rebels lost, it was significant because it showed that a rag-tag band of civilian soldiers could in fact stand up to the best trained and most experienced military in the world at that time.

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies.

A quiet, wealthy plantation owner, Jack Hinson watched the start of the Civil War with disinterest. Opposed to secession and a friend to Union and Confederate commanders alike, he did not want a war. After Union soldiers seized and murdered his sons, placing their decapitated heads on the gateposts of his estate, Hinson could remain indifferent no longer. He commissioned a special rifle for long-range accuracy, he took to the woods, and he set out for revenge.

A magnificent history of the opening years of the Civil War by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bruce Catton. The first book in Bruce Catton's Pulitzer Prize-winning Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Mr. Lincoln's Army is a riveting history of the early years of the Civil War, when a fledgling Union Army took its stumbling first steps under the command of the controversial general George McClellan.

The Battle of Antietam was a turning point in the Civil War. In the span of several hours, there would be more loss of American life than in any other battle before or since, leaving one in four of the soldiers who took part either dead or wounded by the end of the day. What led to such a disastrous conclusion? And could something positive come from such an appalling massacre? The focus of the war was about to change. So, too, was how the American people viewed war as a whole.

Young Henry Fleming used to play soldier and dream of being a hero, but when he faces his first battle - the Battle of Chancellorsville - he finds that heroism is not at all what he had expected. Shells burst in front of him like strange flowers, gunfire ripped toward him in great crackling sheets of flame, and all around him, blue-coated figures lie still on the blood-drenched grass. Remarkably, Stephen Crane wrote this realistic tale of the terror of war without ever witnessing a battle.

Despite the abundance of books on the Civil War, not one has focused exclusively on what was in fact the determining factor in the outcome of the conflict: differences in union and southern strategy. In The Grand Design, Stoker examines how Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis identified their political goals and worked with their generals to craft the military means to achieve them - or how they often failed to do so.

Grinding, bloody, and ultimately decisive, the Petersburg Campaign was the Civil War's longest and among its most complex. A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg offers a gripping, comprehensive history of the decisive campaign in the eastern theater. In this second of three volumes, A. Wilson Greene narrates the critical months from August through October 1864, during which Ulysses S. Grant's army group launched three major offensives against Robert E. Lee's defenses around Petersburg and the Confederate capital in Richmond.

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. 1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents' faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal.

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.

On the night of February 17, 1864, the tiny Confederate submarine HL Hunley made its way toward the USS Housatonic just outside Charleston harbor. Within a matter of hours, the Union ship’s stern was blown open in a spray of wood planks. The explosion sank the ship, killing many of its crew. And the submarine, the first ever to be successful in combat, disappeared without a trace. For 131 years the eight-man crew of the HL Hunley lay in their watery graves, undiscovered.

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

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 that played such an important role in shaping modern America.

In the second book of the Army of the Potomac Trilogy, Bruce Catton - one of America's most honored Civil War historians - once again brings the great battles and the men who fought them to breathtaking life. As the War Between the States moved through its second bloody year, General Ambrose Burnside was selected by President Lincoln to replace the ineffectual George "Little Mac" McClellan as commander of the Union Army. But the hope that greeted Burnside's ascension was quickly dashed in December 1862 in the wake of his devastating defeat at Fredericksburg.

A major new biography of the Civil War general and American president, by the author of the New York Times bestseller A. Lincoln. 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. Based on seven years of research with primary documents, some of them never tapped before, this is destined to become the Grant biography of our times.