Civil War Biography

Grant at 200: Reconsidering the Life and Legacy of Ulysses S. Grant celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of a man whose towering impact on American history has often been overshadowed and, in many cases, ignored. This collection of essays by some of today's leading Grant scholars offers fresh perspectives on Grant's military career and presidency, as well as underexplored personal topics such as his faith and family life.

Lieutenant-General James Longstreet, commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, was a brilliant tactician and strategist. Unfortunately, his advice was not heeded and given the weight it deserved. This work offers a fresh and unique perspective on Lieutenant-General James Longstreet and the Civil War. This narrative takes a new viewpoint of the Civil War and the generals who tailored their designs to pursue the war, analyzes Longstreet's views of the generals and the tactics and strategy they employed, and examines why Longstreet proposed and urged a new type of warfare.

In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117, blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending.

Louisa on the Frontlines is the first narrative nonfiction book focusing on Louisa May Alcott's career as a nurse during the Civil War. Though her service was brief, the dramatic experience was one that she considered pivotal in helping her write the classic Little Women....

In early March 1861, civil war loomed. By late April, Americans had begun to kill their fellow citizens. Cry Havoc! recounts the events that divided the states and reveals how quirks of timing, character, and place all conspired to transform the nation into a battlefield. Nelson Lankford chronicles the eight critical weeks that began with Lincoln's inauguration through the explosion at Fort Sumpter and the president's fateful response to it.

When North and South met in 1865 at Appomattox Court House to end the Civil War, the official terms of surrender weren’t written in the hand of Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, or any white soldier. Instead, this momentous event was recorded by General Ely S. Parker, a member of the Seneca (Iroquois) tribe. At that time, Parker was not only the highest-ranking Native American in the Union Army but also the Grand Sachem, or chief representative, of the Haudenosaunee—the powerful Iroquois Confederacy.

The true story of Captain Sounthone Ratanakone is simply incredible. He was born into royalty in Laos and was a war hero and a CIA operative in the Secret War in Laos during the Vietnam War. The captain barely survived being a POW in a communist concentration camp (which the communists to this day deny ever existed), made a death-defying escape, had to escape the communist regime again once he had settled back home, and lived in a refugee camp. Til the Last is a story of heroism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice at the highest and most dramatic levels.

A gripping narrative history of Spain’s most brilliant and troubled literary family - a tale about the making of art, myth, and legacy - set against the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War and beyond.

A Nigerian native who emigrated to the United States at age 11, Alex Owumi's exploits on the basketball court earned him a college scholarship to Georgetown University. Undrafted by the NBA, Owumi pursued his basketball dream overseas, eventually signing with Al-Nasr of Libya, a state-run athletic club privately funded by the family of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi.

In The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant: Preserving the Civil War’s Legacy, historian Paul Kahan focuses on the unique political, economic, and cultural forces unleashed by the Civil War and how Grant addressed these issues during his tumultuous two terms as chief executive. A timely reassessment, The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant sheds new light on the business of politics in the decade after the Civil War and portrays an energetic and even progressive executive whose legacy has been overshadowed by both his wartime service and his administration’s many scandals.

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.

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.

Excellent biographies have been written about Clara Barton, Sarah Josepha Hale, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Tubman, but their lives have never been looked at together as they intertwined with the Civil War narrative. Plumb compares and contrasts the qualities of the women to discover their common attributes for success and what was unique to each woman. Without leading troops in battle or wielding political power, these five women profoundly influenced the start of the war and its conduct throughout as North and South clashed.

With a unique, witty, and conversational voice historian Robert O'Connell breaks down the often paradoxical, easily caricatured character of General William T. Sherman for the most well-rounded portrait of the man yet written. There were many Shermans, according to O'Connell. Most prominently was Sherman the military strategist (indeed, one of the greatest strategists of all time), who gained an appreciation of geography from early campaigns out west and applied it to his famed Civil War march.

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.

The former general in chief of the Union armies during the Civil War...the two-term president of the United States...the beloved ambassador of American goodwill around the globe...the respected New York financier - Ulysses S. Grant - was dying. The hardscrabble man who regularly smoked 20 cigars a day had developed terminal throat cancer. Thus began Grant’s final battle - a race against his own failing health to complete his personal memoirs in an attempt to secure his family’s financial future. But the project evolved into something far more....

Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House is the life story of Elizabeth Keckley, a shrewd entrepreneur who, while enslaved, raised enough money to purchase freedom for herself and her son. Working as a seamstress and dressmaker for the wives of influential politicians, Keckley helped organize an auction of dresses that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln, the former first lady. The auction elicited strong criticism from the Washington elite.

Raised on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux in 1970s Lebanon, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. As the bombs fell, she lived an adolescence of excess and transgression, defying death in nightclubs. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment by day of the same men who would spend the night with her. As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father's last wish is for his favorite song, "Sinnerman" by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral.

This memoir is from a middle-aged Missourian who was part of the strange yet fascinating world of Civil War reenacting. I tell of my first taste of black powder, "seeing the elephant", fighting heat, rain, cold, mud, politics, movie stars, and live fire. From dog and pony show events to the 125th anniversary spectaculars involving thousands of participants, I reveal the inside skinny on the hobby, as I saw it, with plenty of humor to tickle the funny bone.

This memoir continues the adventures of a middle-aged Missourian who was part of the strange, yet fascinating world of Civil War reenacting. In Volume 2, Robert tells of a trip to Gettysburg, yet another movie, the coldest event that was ever attended, a brief tenure as an officer, a trip to Red River, and other amusements. As with the previous book, Volume 2 is loaded with personal anecdotes and humor.