Civil War Military History

With the outbreak of the Civil War, the small, social, Southern town of Washington, DC, found itself caught between warring sides in a four-year battle that would determine the future of the United States. After the declaration of secession, many fascinating Southern women left the city, leaving their friends - such as Adele Cutts Douglas and Elizabeth Blair Lee - to grapple with questions of safety and sanitation as the capital was transformed into an immense Union army camp and later a hospital.

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 Lincoln and the Civil War, Michael Burlingame explores the experiences and qualities that made Abraham Lincoln one of America's most revered leaders. This volume provides an illuminating overview of the entirety of the Civil War and Lincoln's administration, focusing on the ways in which Lincoln's unique combination of psychological maturity, steely determination, and political wisdom made him the North's secret weapon that ultimately led to supremacy over the Confederacy.

In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces.

The United States fought a long, bitter, deadly war from 1861-1865 over secession, states' right to govern themselves, and the right to keep a way of life based on slavery. Great Battles of the Civil War is the story of that war, of its most shocking and violent battles: Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Atlanta, Petersburg, and Sherman's March to the Sea.

Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis.

One of the most important and memorable events of the United States' westward push across the frontier came with the discovery of gold, in the lands that became California, in January 1848. Located thousands of miles away from the country's power centers on the East Coast at the time, the announcement came a month before the Mexican-American War ended. It brought an influx of an estimated 90,000 "Forty-Niners" to the region in 1849, hailing from other parts of America and even as far away as Asia.

With Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the freed black men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

In 1934, a pair of teenagers from Baltimore by the names of Theodore Jones and Henry Grob embarked on what they thought would be another lazy summer afternoon. They popped in at the soda shop and idly browsed through the aisles of few local mom-and-pop stores, but when they could not kill their boredom, they decided to return to Grob's place for an impromptu treasure hunt. Clunky metal detectors in hand, they roamed around the backyard, discovering and delighting in odd metal knickknacks along the way. What started out as just another slow-moving summer's day turned out to be anything but when one of the detectors began to go off.

Ty Seidule grew up revering Robert E. Lee. From his southern childhood to his service in the US Army, every part of his life reinforced the Lost Cause myth: that Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, and that the Confederates were underdogs who lost the Civil War with honor. Now, as a retired brigadier general and Professor Emeritus of History at West Point, his view has radically changed. From a soldier, a scholar, and a southerner, Ty Seidule believes that American history demands a reckoning.

Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis penned "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" in 1881, offering a historical perspective and justification for the Confederacy's formation and actions during the Civil War. While serving as a valuable primary source for understanding Confederate leadership's motivations, the work is also recognized for its biased defense of the Confederacy and its "Lost Cause" narrative.

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise comes to life. The U.S. government pitted two companies - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads - against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. As its peak the work force approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as 15,000 workers on each line. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, lived off buffalo, deer, and antelope.

The dominant narrative about the causes of the Civil War is the work of historians obsessed with social activism instead of history.

Do you want to learn how the bloodiest military conflict in American History began, was fought, and ultimately won by the Allies? Hear about the 50 most important events of the Civil War, from the very beginning to the fall of the Confederate states. This book is perfect for history lovers. Author James Weber did the research and compiled this huge list of events and battles that changed the course of history forever.

For more than 100 years, a submarine lay buried beneath the ocean floor near Charleston, South Carolina. This Civil War stealth weapon, the H.L. Hunley, made history in 1864 as the first submarine ever to sink an enemy ship. But something went wrong during that daring mission. The Hunley never returned to port.

The Overland Campaign that pitted Robert E. Lee against Ulysses S. Grant is one of the most famous campaigns of the Civil War, and May 1864 witnessed the Civil War’s greatest chess match as Lee skillfully blocked Grant’s attempts to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia only to watch his tenacious opponent keep advancing south toward Richmond. Lee and Grant fought to a standstill in the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and along the North Anna. By the time the two armies reached Cold Harbor near the end of May 1864, Grant incorrectly thought that Lee’s army was on the verge of collapse.

The second biggest battle of the entire war mostly gets overlooked among casual listeners, despite the fact it represented the last great chance for the Confederates to salvage the Western theater.

After the last major pitched battle of the Overland Campaign was fought at Cold Harbor in early June, Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac had suffered more casualties during the campaign than Robert E. Lee had in his entire Army of Northern Virginia at the start of May. Understandably, the American public was shocked by the carnage, and to this day Grant has been accused of being a butcher, but attrition had become a vital war aim for the North, and Grant remained undeterred.

Nothing in American history has ever equaled the death and destruction of the intense and bloody warfare of 1861-1865 between Americans. For later generations, such a horror must have the comfort of a moral justification. The war must have been a noble and necessary crusade carried out against evil people who refused to give up their slaves. But is this true? Did those men in blue really sacrifice their lives for the freedom and equality of Black Americans? Did those men in gray give their lives so that some could continue to hold Black Americans in slavery?

This work is a narrative of Zachary Taylor’s Mexican War campaign, from the formation of his army in 1844 to his last battle at Buena Vista in 1847, with emphasis on the 163 men in his “Army of Occupation” who became Confederate or Union generals in the Civil War. It clarifies what being a Mexican War veteran meant in their cases, how they interacted with one another, how they performed their various duties, and how they reacted under fire.