Civil War Railroads

In April of 1843, Phoebe’s family hears about a murder while they are traveling to their new home in the Shenandoah Valley. They arrive to learn the victim attended her father's new church and the crime took place on a leading church member’s plantation. Eager to make new friends, Phoebe forms a unique relationship that propels her into the middle of the mystery, and she begins to question several acquaintances’ motives. Will she uncover their secrets before the plantation owner’s charming son discovers hers?

After four years of marriage, Virginia and Angus still have no children. When an opportunity to adopt a child arises, the couple seize it, believing it to be an answer to their many prayers. The hatred and violence that follows makes them question if they made the right choice. Would the child be better off with her father, or do they stand against racism and hatred and raise her as their own?

Rachel Benton and her daughter embark on a pleasant country drive to research her ancestors when a sudden storm drives them in an unexpected direction. Stranded and alone, an isolated cabin seems to offer refuge, but within those timbered walls more threats await. Rachel’s troubles in the present are woven together with a family embroiled in the Civil War and the lives they touch on their journey to freedom. Lives are imperiled, and a dawning realization changes Rachel’s life forever. Dual time lines skillfully woven together draw readers into the action-filled story. And true details ...

A union spy, James Andrews, leads a group of union volunteers on a dangerous mission to steal a confederate locomotive, only to find the engineer will stop at nothing to get it back. April 1862. The American Civil War has been raging for a year. Northern spy James J. Andrews launches a daring raid into Georgia to disrupt Southern transportation, a move that could end the war. He steals a locomotive “The General” and begins a race to friendly lines, while “The General”’s engineer, Bill Fuller is determined to get it back.

A knock came on the door in the dead of night. On the verge of Civil War, such a summons meant trouble and danger. To ignore it offered momentary reprieve for the Ward family: it also meant shirking duty. Such was not in their make-up, for the Wards, otherwise known as the landlocked "Kansas Pirates," had taken the buccaneer's oath to protect one another, and, by association, the oppressed, against tyranny and injustice.Their help was urgently needed to guide runaway slaves from "Bleeding Kansas" across the river to safer ground. Barbara Nelander-Ward, former first mate aboard the Bottom ...

Twelve-year-old Ann Maria Weems works from sunup to sundown, wraps rags around her feet in the winter, and must do whatever her master or mistress orders—but she has something that many plantation slaves don't have. She has her wonderful family around her. To Ann, her teasing brothers, her older sister, and her protective and loving parents are everything. And then one day, they are gone. Separated from her family by her master and shipped off as a housemaid, Ann learns something about independence and about love before the opportunity for escape arrives.

They came by boat from a starving land, and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains, seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe, as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.

In 1850 in Massachusetts, Whittaker House stood as a stop on the Underground Railroad. It’s where two freedom seekers, Little Annie and Clementine, hid and perished. Whittaker House still stands, and Little Annie and Clementine still linger, their dreams of freedom unfulfilled. Now a fashionably distressed vacation rental in the Berkshires, Whittaker House draws seekers of another kind: Black women who only appear to be free.

The Transcontinental Railroad, laid across the United States during the 1860s, remains the very epitome of contradiction. On the one hand, it was a triumph of engineering skills over thousands of miles of rough terrain, but on the other hand, it drained the natural resources in those places nearly dry.

On December 18, 1867, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad's eastbound New York Express derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers

A novel memoir that dreams of a time where all people are equal. Callie Brandonfeld once lived on a beautiful plantation in southern Virginia, where tall oak and magnolia trees offered shade. In the spring, blossoms perfumed the air. Yes, it was an idyllic place to grow up, except when it wasn't. It was early summer of 1858 when eighteen-year-old Callie ran away from her family home. She was desperate to find a place where all people are treated like people, not possessions. Would she ever find such a place? And could she survive the long journey to get there?

It’s May 1863. Outgeneraled and outgunned, a demoralized Union Army has pulled back with massive losses at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Fort Sumter, hated symbol of the Rebellion, taunts the American navy with its artillery and underwater mines. In Beaufort, SC, one very special woman, code named Moses, is hatching a spectacular plan. Hunted by Confederates, revered by slaves, Harriet Tubman plots an expedition behind enemy lines to liberate hundreds of bondsmen and recruit them as soldiers.

Follow a seventeen year old mercenary from Germany in this fiction/fantasy novel as he travels to America, fights in the Civil War by spying and blowing up ammunition trains. Then, through his experience with the newly patented dynamite builds railroads across America. Meet the woman he marries, who he saves from a renegade Indian attack on the western plains. As he settles in the town he established in the hills of Pennsylvania, he discovers a cave with a magic elixir, "Fountain of Youth" and builds a national tourist attraction. All this in a page turner that will keep you cheering for an...

Thomas B. Allen’s expertise in military history and strategy is combined with Roger MacBride Allen’s knowledge of technology to reveal a lesser-known yet fascinating side of the 16th president of the United States. Their authoritative narrative reveals Lincoln as our nation’s first hands-on commander in chief, whose appreciation for the power of technology plays a critical role in the North’s Civil War victory over the less-developed South.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, notwithstanding its merits as a feat of exploration, was also the first tentative claim on the vast interior and the western seaboard of North America by the United States. It set in motion the great movement west that began almost immediately with the first commercial overland expedition funded by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company and would continue with the establishment of the Oregon Trail and California Trail. That quest would reach its ultimate expression ...when the last spike was driven into the Union Pacific Railroad.

Praised by Alice Walker and many other best-selling writers, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is an award-winning debut novel with incredible heart about life on the prairie as it's rarely been seen. Reminiscent of The Color Purple as well as the frontier novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather, it opens a window on the little-known history of African American homesteaders and gives voice to an extraordinary heroine who embodies the spirit that built America.

In the rural town of Paxton, Alabama, a high school junior lives in the shadow of a father he never knew—a railroad stationmaster who died after being drafted into WWII just before his birth. Years after his father's death, a twist of legal fortune granted his family ownership of the abandoned rail yard adjacent to their home. It is here where the boy and his new girlfriend, Samantha, discover an incredible secret: the “Tullahoma,” a forgotten Civil War-era locomotive of historical significance tucked away in an old repair shop on the deserted property. Aided by their history teacher,...

Before the rails bound a nation, before love defied all barriers, there was a foundation laid in quiet longing and impossible dreams. Xiulan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants serving the Hastings family, has grown up in the shadow of wealth and privilege, her every day intertwined with the grandeur of the estate. But within her heart lies a secret: an unspoken affection for Robert Hastings, the heir who left for the Civil War when she was just a girl. Now, as the household eagerly anticipates his return, Xiulan’s quiet admiration blossoms into something deeper—something dangerous. ...

When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad's leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can't bear children, but as the country steers toward bloody civil war, Sarah faces difficult sacrifices that could put all she loves in peril.

The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad.