English Civil War

Decker Brown is a proud young Virginian, Boston-educated, with plans to manufacture fireworks and raise a family. He loves Paula Crane, the daughter of a Virginia flour mill owner. When the country is divided by Civil War, their loyalty to each other is put to the ultimate test. Decker believes in the Republic's promise of liberty. Paula can't imagine taking up arms against her friends and neighbors.

Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.

Among all the various figures in 19th century America who left controversial legacies, it is hard to find one as influential as Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the founder of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Mormonism, and the Latter-Day Saint movement. Revered as a prophet on the level of Moses by some, reviled as a perpetrator of large-scale fraud by others, what everyone can agree on is that Joseph Smith founded a religious movement that played a crucial role in the settlement of the West, especially in Utah.

As a child, Zeke Proctor walked the Trail of Tears from Georgia to west of Arkansas, acquiring a fierce loyalty to the Cherokee way. Though a family man and a respected member of the Cherokee Senate, Zeke the man is an adventurous charmer. Ned Christie is tall and charismatic, with waist-length hair and a handsomeness that appeals to women all over the Going Snake District. Ned's long and determined resistance to the relentless pressure of white law makes him a hero to the Cherokee people.

In Robert E. Lee, the award-winning historian Allen Guelzo has written the definitive biography of the general, following him from his refined upbringing in Virginia high society, to his long career in the U.S. Army, his agonized decision to side with Virginia when it seceded from the Union, and his leadership during the Civil War. Above all, Guelzo captures Robert E. Lee in all his complexity--his hypocrisy and courage, his outward calm and inner turmoil, his honor and his disloyalty.

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.

In all of Roman history there was never a more turbulent year than A.D. 69, the ill-omened "Year of the Three Emperors". By some miracle, the greatest historian of the age, Tacitus, was able to chronicle those momentous events in a work he called The History. In its pages are some of the most memorable events of Roman history described in some of the most intensely passionate prose ever devised.

In 1831, the American ship Comet, carrying 165 enslaved men, women, and children, crashed onto a coral reef near the shore of the Bahamas, then part of the British Empire. Shortly afterward, the Vice Admiralty Court in Nassau set the rescued captives free. In a work of profoundly relevant research and storytelling, historian and Frederick Douglass Prize–winner Jeff Forret uncovers how the Comet incident—as well as similar episodes that unfolded over the next decade—resulted in the British Crown making reparations payments to a U.S. government that strenuously represented slaveholder interests.

In 1840, millions of Black Americans groaned in the chains of slavery. By 1920, millions of American men and women of every race had won the vote. In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal.

In 1855, with the United States at odds over slavery, the lawyer Abraham Lincoln wrote a note to his best friend, the son of a Kentucky slaveowner. Lincoln rebuked his friend for failing to oppose slavery. But he added: “If for this you and I must differ, differ we must,” and said they would be friends forever. Throughout his life and political career, Lincoln often agreed to disagree.

Two decades after the Civil War, first-generation Irish-American Zachary O'Hara, son of a legendary Marine and a force of a man in his own right, finds himself playing a critical role as the very existence of the Marine Corps is being decided. If he can help persuade the Secretary of the Navy that the Marines will be crucial to America's security in years to come, all the while hefting a heavy, secret weight in his heart, he'll save the Corps and make his career.

In August 1862, after decades of broken treaties, increasing hardship, and relentless encroachment on their lands, a group of Dakota warriors convened a council at the tepee of their leader, Little Crow. Knowing the strength and resilience of the young American nation, Little Crow counseled caution, but anger won the day. Forced to either lead his warriors in a war he knew they could not win or leave them to their fates, he declared, "[Little Crow] is not a coward: he will die with you."

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers.

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.

On the evening of May 17, 1980, a day before the Peruvian electorate - the most representative in the nation’s history - was due to go to the polls for the first authentic presidential election since 1963, a curious thing happened. In the tiny mountain town of Chuschi, little more than a hamlet nestled in a valley on the western slopes of the Andes, a group of armed youth broke the lock on the town hall and removed all of the ballot boxes, papers, and voting lists prepared for the following day.

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This fictional recreation of the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 is a stunning work of imaginative history, from Shelby Foote, beloved historian of the Civil War. Shiloh conveys not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants' hearts and minds.

During the Civil War, both sides believed that whoever controlled the Mississippi River would ultimately be victorious. Cotton exports generated much-needed revenue for the Confederacy, and the Mississippi was also the main conduit for the delivery of materials and food. Similarly, the Union sought to maintain safe passage from St. Louis, Missouri, to Cairo, Illinois, but also worked to bisect the South by seizing the river as part of the Anaconda Plan.

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame - and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

The Far Right's rise to power has ignited a digital civil war that rages across multiple fronts and multiple platforms. It is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to intimidate and incite, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. The combatants are citizens, activists, politicians, pundits, coders, conspiracists, trolls, agitators, hackers, and journalists. At stake are the nation's bedrock principles: equal rights, fair elections, freedom of speech, racial justice, and the rule of law.