English Civil War

The Texan Confederate army under General Henry H. Sibley, their supply train destroyed by the 1st Colorado Union Volunteers at Glorieta Pass, have only one prize remaining: a battery of Union artillery captured at the Battle of Valverde. The Texans, their force decimated, dispirited by the absence of fallen comrades, are determined to have some glory to show for their terrible losses. But standing in their way are Union Captain Alastar O'Brien and the Colorado Volunteers.

No city was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort - or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and matériel for the war, and no city raised more hell against it. It was a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists but simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance, and sedition. Without his New York supporters, it's highly unlikely Lincoln would have made it to the White House.

Meredith I. "Andy" Anderson teams with Kristi Sandgren for Civil War Women of Courage. A collection of exciting stories about 13 young women, 11 to 24 years of age, based on actual events reported in letters and newspapers during our nation's greatest conflict. From the streets of Baltimore to the Indian ravaged frontier of Minnesota and across the battlefields of the South, it's nonstop adventure. History in the words of those who lived it. Be part of each life as their story unfolds.

David Henry White, a free Black teenage sailor from Lewes, Delaware, was kidnapped by Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate raider Alabama on October 9, 1862, from the Philadelphia-based packet ship Tonawanda. In a best-selling postwar memoir, Semmes falsely described White as a contented slave who remained loyal to the Confederacy. In Kidnapped at Sea, archaeologist Andrew Sillen uses a forensic approach to describe White’s enslavement and demise and illustrates how White’s actual life belies the Lost Cause narrative his captors sought to construct.

A nation cannot be civil without civility. To some, civility cannot be restored until power is regained. A Civil War was a necessary evil, but make no mistake, it was evil. What do we, as human beings, owe to one another? And, what does it mean to be civilized when civilization is collapsing all around you? Author Bobby Akart once again masterfully tells a tale of a nation on the edge of societal collapse. For decades, Americans had found themselves increasingly at odds with one another - politically, socially, and culturally.

G. Ward Hubbs uses a stark and iconic political cartoon to illuminate postwar conflicts over the meaning of freedom in the American South. The cartoon first appeared in the Tuskaloosa Independent Monitor, published by local Ku Klux Klan boss Ryland Randolph, as a swaggering threat aimed at three individuals. The four men associated with the cartoon were archetypes of those who were seeking to rebuild a South shattered by war. Their lives, but especially their four very different understandings of freedom, help to explain many of the conflicts of the 1860s.

The task for those in charge of professionalizing the military in the first half of the nineteenth century and transforming it from a militia-led army to a highly disciplined standing army was a difficult job. Americans had long supported a tradition of militia and distrusted professional soldiers.

In 2001, while vacationing on Panama’s Pacific coast, maritime archaeologist James P. Delgado came upon the hulk of a mysterious iron vessel, revealed by the ebbing tides in a small cove at Isla San Telmo. He learned that the wreck was the remains of one of the first successful deep-diving submersibles, built in 1864 by Julius H. Kroehl, an innovator during the Civil War. Delgado chronicles the confluence of technological advancement, entrepreneurial aspiration, American capitalist ambition, and ignorance of the physiological effects of deep diving in this compelling narrative.

Our DANTES study guides are different! The Civil War and Reconstruction DANTES/DSST Study Guide teaches you everything that you need to know to pass the DSST test. This study guide has more than sample test questions. Our easy-to-understand study guide will teach you the information. We’ve condensed what you need to know into a manageable book—one that will leave you completely prepared to tackle the test. This study guide includes sample test questions that will test your knowledge and teach you new material.

From a daring Confederate raid that nearly seized Washington, DC, to a stunning reversal on the bloody fields of Cedar Creek, the summer and autumn of 1864 witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of our Civil War, in mighty battles now all but forgotten.

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.

Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Yet the dominant interpretation of camping as a modern recreational ideal has obscured the connections to these other roles. Camping Grounds rediscovers unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside.

This collection of narratives, all told by people who were actually part of the American Civil War, was first published in 1885 and was received very well by the public, who caused it to have a further five reprints during the next few years. You'll hear about a number of famous escapades that took place during the Civil War, from a civilian with Unionist sympathies but living in the South, through to the unparalleled locomotive chase that inspired Buster Keaton's all time classic silent movie The General.

Honor and conviction clash with loyalty and love in this epic Civil War novel that pits brother against brother. Winner of the coveted John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction, Noble Cause chronicles the clash of a Confederate cavalry officer with a Union spy as they defend their beliefs, their country, and their honor.

This is a collection of remarkable personal accounts of a variety of American Civil War incidents, from both Union and Confederate perspectives. These vivid and absorbing reminiscences provide an inside view of many fascinating events of the time, shedding light on our shared past and illuminating the character and point of view of those who lived through an extraordinary time in our nation's history. Enjoy these excursions back through the mists of time, recounted by those who were there.

Having survived the bloody Battle of New Orleans and the loss of their ironclad Yazoo River, captain Samuel Bowater, engineer Hieronymus Taylor, and the survivors of their crew are given new orders—take command of an ironclad warship being built in Memphis, Tennessee. Bowater and his men take passage upriver from “Mississippi” Mike Sullivan, one of the wild, undisciplined captains of the River Defense Squadron, only to find, on their arrival, that their ship is not even half built and the enemy is closing fast.

For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation's capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families.

In 1862, the first Conscription Act in American History was enacted by the Confederacy. In Texas, it was met with immediate loathing and resentment. It placed the burden of military service on the small farmers, and exempted rich plantation owners and overseers, among others. Among those conscripted was A.B. Forbes of Ellis County, who had immigrated to the State in 1854.

Eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin “B .F.” Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father’s path. Thus begins a trip of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States. B. F. spends the next 11 years in gold rush towns in California - first as a barber, then as a physician’s assistant - before departing for the Caribbean at age 19, where he becomes a blockade runner during the American Civil War.

In the decades that followed the American Civil War, artist James E. Kelly (1855-1933) conducted in-depth interviews with more than 40 Union generals in an effort to accurately portray them in their greatest moment of glory.