Civil War Military History

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family is brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the family Whitman. Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother George Washington Whitman, who led his men in 21 major battles almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended.

In June of 1861, only a few weeks after the first shots at Fort Sumter ignited the Civil War, Union prisoners of war began to arrive in Southern prisons. One hundred and fifty years later, Civil War prisons and the way prisoners of war were treated remain contentious topics. Partisans of each side continue to vilify the other for POW maltreatment.

This reunion drew over 55,000 official attendees who descended upon a town of four thousand during the summer of 1913 with the promise of little more than a cot and two blankets, military fare, and the presence of countless adversaries from a horrific war. Most were revisiting a time and place in their personal history that involved acute physical and emotional trauma. Contrary to popular belief, veterans were not motivated to attend by a desire for reconciliation, nor did the Great Reunion produce a general sense of a reunified country.

During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle - the underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob actions, and sectional politics - are well known as parts of other stories.

This was a decade-long struggle that toppled a dictatorship, reshaped the nation's social fabric, and set the stage for modern Mexico. This turbulent conflict pitted revolutionary leaders like Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Venustiano Carranza against the oppressive regimes of Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano Huerta, leading to sweeping political and social reforms. In this concise yet comprehensive book, you'll explore the revolutionary battles, shifting alliances, and the fight for land reform that defined the era.

Though generally remembered by history as two very different personalities, the soft-spoken Lincoln and often-crude Grant in fact shared similar drive and determination, as this in-depth character study illustrates.

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.

Facing an insurmountable deficit in resources compared to the Union navy, the Confederacy resorted to unorthodox forms of warfare to combat enemy forces. Perhaps the most energetic and effective torpedo corps and secret service company organized during the American Civil War, the Singer Secret Service Corps, led by Texan inventor and entrepreneur Edgar Collins Singer, developed and deployed submarines, underwater weaponry, and explosive devices.

As the Confederacy steadily crumbled under the Union army's relentless hammering, dramatic developments in early 1865 brought the bloody war to a swift climax and denouement. Their Last Full Measure relates these thrilling events, which followed one another like falling dominoes - from Fort Fisher's capture to the burning of South Carolina's capital to the fall of Petersburg and Richmond and, ultimately, to Lee's surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination.

This contemporary classic explores the role of boys who fought in the Civil War. No listener's vision of America’s most brutal and bloody war will be the same after listening to this audiobook.

The definitive refutation of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, this volume includes original essays, lectures, and interviews with historians. Topics addressed include the complex development of slavery in the New World, the American Revolution, the sectional crisis over slavery and the Civil War, the struggle for social equality in the 20th century, and the class politics of racial identity in the present.

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.

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia met in the Battle of Hampton Roads—the first time ironclad vessels would engage each other in combat. For four hours the two ships pummeled one another as thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians watched from the shorelines. Although the battle ended in a draw, this engagement would change the nature of naval warfare by informing both vessel design and battle tactics.

The service of African-American soldiers during the Civil War is one of that conflict's most stirring, if still not completely understood, aspects. Riders in the Storm covers the story of the African-American cavalrymen of the 5th Massachusetts. Where the infantry regiments recruited largely free Blacks from the North, the 5th focused on escaped slaves, who it was believed would be better horsemen. Not only would the former slaves be fighting for themselves, but they would be fighting to liberate loved ones still enslaved.

In the summer of 1862, after a year of protracted fighting, Abraham Lincoln decided on a radical change of strategy - one that abandoned hope for a compromise peace and committed the nation to all-out war. The centerpiece of that new strategy was the Emancipation Proclamation: an unprecedented use of federal power that would revolutionize Southern society. In The Long Road to Antietam, Richard Slotkin, a renowned cultural historian, reexamines the challenges that Lincoln encountered during that anguished summer 150 years ago.

Some 100,000 soldiers fought in the April 1862 battle of Shiloh, and nearly 20,000 men were killed or wounded; more Americans died on that Tennessee battlefield than had died in all the nation's previous wars combined. In the first book in his new series, Steven E. Woodworth has brought together a group of superb historians to reassess this significant battle and provide in-depth analyses of key aspects of the campaign and its aftermath.

Lincoln's Citadel is a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.

In the fall of 1865, the United States Army executed Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson for his role in murdering fifty-three loyal citizens of Kentucky and Tennessee during the Civil War. Long remembered as the most unforgiving and inglorious warrior of the Confederacy, Ferguson has often been dismissed by historians as a cold-blooded killer. Here, biographer Brian D. McKnight demonstrates how such a simple judgment ignores the complexity of this legendary character.

Veteran CIA correspondent Douglas Waller delivers a riveting account of the heroes and misfits who carried out a shadow war of espionage and covert operations behind the Confederate battlefields. Lincoln’s Spies follows four agents from the North - three men and one woman - who informed Lincoln’s generals on the enemy positions for crucial battles and busted up clandestine Rebel networks.

Benson Bobrick, recipient of the 2002 American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, tells the story of Benjamin “Webb” Baker, his greatgrandfather. Webb enlisted in the Union Army in 1861 and thereafter suffered through horrid conditions in camp and absolute hell in combat. Benson’s fascinating look atthe Civil War also contains a heretofore unreleased collection of Webb’s letters.